Compartir
The Hague, 24 December 2024: There is a window of opportunity to achieve an objective in Syria that was unimaginable just a month ago – to locate and identify tens of thousands of Syrians who are missing as a result of decades of repression, conflict and mass displacement.
Estimates of the number of missing range from 100,000 to 200,000. It is critical that any process to locate these people and investigate their disappearance is led by Syria and that the authorities place the interests and rights of families of the missing front and center. An effective process will establish the fate of missing persons, secure the human rights of survivors and victims and lay the groundwork for holding perpetrators to account.
Given that the majority of missing persons are men, Syrian women, who constitute the majority of survivors, must play a leading role in driving the missing persons process forward and they must be central to the strategy that is formed.
The building blocks of such a process do not have to be devised from scratch. As has been said many times, this conflict is one of the most comprehensively documented in history – not least because many brave Syrians have collected data and documented atrocities over the last decade, in many cases risking their lives to do so. This documentation will be essential now.
The first step is to protect mass graves and places of detention so that evidence can be gathered systematically and to a standard that will make it possible to present this evidence at future war crimes trials.
The next step is for Syria, with the support of international experts, including forensic anthropologists and archeologists, to conduct judicial investigations in all cases, collecting and collating verifiable information on crimes and crime scenes, and on perpetrators and victims. With the support of Syrian civil society organizations (CSOs) and international organizations, an integrated data system must be created so that data on missing persons and sites of forensic interest, including mass graves, can be verified and used to help Syria create a Central Record of all missing persons.
These steps will be properly supported if international organizations pool their expertise and their resources and agree on a missing persons assistance plan that can be presented to the Syrian authorities.
Since 2017, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has been laying the foundations for a comprehensive Syrian missing persons program that can be scaled up quickly. ICMP has already collected data from almost 80,000 relatives who have reported almost 30,000 missing persons. Data, including genetic reference samples, has been collected from the Syrian Diaspora and from those areas of Syria that were not under the control of the Assad Regime. The opportunity now exists to extend this program across the country.
The creation of the UN’s Independent Institution on Missing Persons (IIMP) is an important step forward. The IIMP can, among other measures, support the efforts of Syrian civil society. The engagement of civil society, including a recognized and active role for families of the missing, has the capacity to bridge political differences and must be based on finding all missing persons and securing the rights of all families, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation, gender, or role in the conflict.
States hosting Syrian refugees should be encouraged to support CSOs working in the Syrian Diaspora, and support should be given to Syrian human rights groups and first responders already operating inside Syria.
Longer-term, it will be necessary to create a domestic Law on Missing Persons; it will also be necessary to establish an inter-ministerial Commission on Missing persons, and to create a Syrian Central Record on missing persons.
ICMP speaks from experience: it has worked in more than 40 countries, most notably in the Western Balkans, where more than 75 percent of the 40,000 missing persons from the conflicts of the 1990s have been accounted for, including more than 90 percent of the 8,000 men and boys massacred in the Srebrenica Genocide of 1995.
About ICMP
ICMP is a treaty-based intergovernmental organization with Headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands. Its mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and others in locating and identifying missing persons from conflict, human rights abuses, disasters, organized crime, irregular migration and other causes and to assist them in doing so. ICMP also supports the work of other organizations in their efforts, encourages public participation in its activities, and promotes the development of appropriate forms of commemoration and commemoration of the missing.
