Поділіться
Srebrenica, 11 July 2025: The painstaking and scientifically rigorous DNA-led process that has identified human remains recovered from mass graves in Srebrenica and across the Western Balkans is helping survivors to access their right to truth and justice, Kathryne Bomberger, the Director-General of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) said today.
Ms Bomberger was speaking in Srebrenica during events organized to mark the 30th anniversary of the July 1995 Genocide. This included the burial at the Potocari Memorial Cemetery of seven newly-identified victims.
The missing persons process that has been developed in Bosnia and Herzegovina has made it possible to locate and identify more than three quarters of the 30,000 people who went missing during the conflict of the 1990s, including more than 7,000 of the 8,000 men and boys who were murdered after the fall of Srebrenica in 1995.
“This remarkable number of identifications, which has not been equaled anywhere else in the world, was achieved by families of the missing working actively with institutions that were established under law to account for the missing and support survivors,” Ms Bomberger said. “These institutions have worked together, developing a process that is now being deployed in countries around the world.”
Ms Bomberger said the associations of families, in Srebrenica, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and across the region have played a pivotal role: “For the first time in history, survivors – especially women – have led a movement that has transformed personal grief into organized, civic action on a national and international scale.”
The DNA-led process in Bosnia and Herzegovina is underpinned by the Law on Missing Persons, enacted at the end of 2004 with support from ICMP, and the Missing Persons Institute (MPI), co-founded by ICMP and the BIH Council of Ministers and operational since 2008. MPI investigators conduct investigations in cooperation with the BIH Prosecutor’s Office, which initiates exhumations through the State Court. This judicial oversight, as well as the application of international chain-of-custody protocols and genetic science and advanced database technology, has made it possible to present crucial evidence from the location and identification process in domestic and international courts.
Families of the missing have direct representation in the MPI and, through a network of domestic and regional associations, have maintained effective advocacy on the missing persons issue. The Missing Persons Group, established with ICMP support as part of the Berlin Process, brings together regional institutions that are responsible for the issue and has facilitated cross-border information exchange that has led to more identifications.
The DNA-led process pioneered by ICMP uses dedicated software to compare DNA profiles collected from families of the missing with DNA extracted from human remains found in mass and clandestine graves, and has been particularly effective in the context of Srebrenica, where the perpetrators tried to hide evidence in the months after the Genocide, by bulldozing primary mass graves and moving the human remains of victims to clandestine sites miles from the original crime scene.
Ms Bomberger emphasized that the process “has delivered incontrovertible scientific evidence of the mass murder that took place at Srebrenica, by establishing conclusive connections between victims, execution sites, and burial locations. The evidence produced through this process – rigorously scrutinized by domestic and international courts – refutes all attempts to deny that the Genocide took place.”
Although tens of thousands of people who went missing during the conflict have been accounted for, Ms Bomberger noted that “more than a thousand families from Srebrenica and more than 10,000 families across the Western Balkans still do not know the fate of their loved one. The most meaningful way of expressing solidarity with families and supporting recovery is to maintain the search for truth and justice.”
ICMP’s Western Balkans Program promotes cooperation among countries in the region to build trust and identify shared challenges and solutions to finding the remaining missing persons, empowers families of the missing and CSOs, enhances the technical capacities of domestic institutions by providing assistance in advanced DNA technologies and data systems, and endeavors to ensure continued regional cooperation by supporting the Missing Persons Group and the Regional Coordination.
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 missing persons from conflict, human rights abuses, disasters, organized crime, migration and other causes and to assist them in doing so. Created at the 1996 G-7 Summit to address the issue of persons missing as a consequence of the conflicts in the Western Balkans, ICMP has been working globally since 2004.
