Croatia: missing persons list still long seventeen years on

Croatia: seventeen years on, missing persons list still contains more than 2000 names

Zagreb 18 July 2012 – Seventeen years after the end of the conflict in Croatia, 2,322 people are still unaccounted for. The third edition of the Book of Persons Missing on the Territory of the Republic of Croatia in the 1991-1995 conflict, which is an up-to-date list of those who went missing in Croatia and of requests to trace human remains, will today be published and presented in Zagreb, Croatia.

The main purpose of the book is to serve as a tool in the tracing process and as a trigger for people to provide additional information as to what happened to those who are still missing.

More than 6,400 persons were reported to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as missing in the armed conflict that took place between 1991 and 1995 on the territory of Croatia. We now know what happened to most of these people, but many families are still living in anguish and uncertainty, unable to exercise their basic humanitarian right – the right to know the fate of their relatives.

The data in the book has been consolidated through cooperation the Croatian Red Cross Tracing Service and the Administration of Detained and Missing Persons of the Croatian Ministry of Veterans, and cross-checked by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Red Cross of Serbia and the Commission for Missing Persons of the Government of the Republic of Serbia.

In all, 34,882 persons have at some time been reported as missing in connection with the conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo. The families of more than 13,000 of these people are still waiting for answers.

For further information, please visit our website: www.icrc.org

ENDS

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