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After over 40 years of humanitarian efforts in a range of conflict regions, I feel the annual August 30 International Day of the Disappeared deserves particular focus. In recent years this has been an occasion to confront the bleak truth that more and more people are going missing around the world, as a result of conflict and climate change, among other threats. Wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Syria and elsewhere have left tens of thousands of families in an agonizing state of not knowing the fate of their loved ones.
Accounting for the missing is central to efforts to end conflict, and central to upholding truth and justice. Prosecuting those responsible for disappearances is indispensable if peace is to take root over the long term.
In the midst of active conflict, it may seem quixotic to speak about documenting evidence to establish the fate of victims and survivors and to bring perpetrators to justice, but the feasibility of this approach has been demonstrated by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in the nearly three decades during which it has been helping authorities and families of the missing to account for victims of involuntary disappearance. Created in 1996 at the initiative of then-US President Bill Clinton, initially to coordinate the search for missing persons from the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, ICMP now operates all over the world.
In the Western Balkans, ICMP spearheaded a regional effort that has made it possible to account for more than three quarters of the 40,000 people who went missing in the 1990s. Evidence gathered by ICMP and its partners during the exhumation of mass and clandestine graves was presented at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and in domestic courts in the Western Balkans during the successful prosecution of individuals who were responsible for disappearances.
In the former Yugoslavia, the process of accounting for the missing also highlighted the power and the importance of grassroots rapprochement. In the decades after the war, slowly and courageously, families of the missing from communities and nationalities that had been on opposite sides during the fighting began to make common cause. This is the basis in shared humanity on which long-term peace can be built.
When a person disappears, the relationship between survivors (particularly those from minority communities) and the authorities may be complicated; property rights, for example, or the welfare and education of children may be compromised by the absence of a death certificate. A majority of those who go missing in conflict are men, which means that women – often in situations where the authorities have had a hand in the disappearance of their menfolk, or where social custom favors men in any active role – are obliged to fight for their own and their families’ rights. In the more than 20 years that I have been working on this issue, I have witnessed the strength, the resilience and the indomitable solidarity of such women.
Today in Ukraine, ICMP is implementing a program to help the authorities develop a systematic, DNA-led process to locate and identify tens of thousands of people who have gone missing as a result of the Russian invasion. In June this year, ICMP organized a roundtable at its Headquarters in The Hague at which Ukrainian and international government officials, technical experts and civil society representatives examined the steps that can be taken to repatriate children who were forcibly taken from Ukraine and placed with Russian families. This will require a concerted legal effort on the part of the Ukrainian authorities and the international mechanisms designed to maintain the rule of law, to ensure that the rights of these children and their families are restored, and the perpetrators are brought to justice. It will also require the application of advanced DNA technology and a program of psychosocial support.
ICMP has also supported efforts by civil society, inside and outside Syria, to gather evidence that will help to establish the fate of thousands of people who have gone missing through conflict and repression. In Iraq, where ICMP has been working for nearly two decades, it recently brought together key policymakers and civil society representatives to renew a long-term effort to harness all the resources at the disposal of the authorities to account for missing persons. An ambitious new program to account for hundreds of thousands of missing from three decades of conflict in Vietnam was launched recently together with the authorities in Hanoi.
Her Majesty Queen Noor has been an ICMP Commissioner since 2001.
