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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2010
Every war brings its share of missing persons, whether military or civilian. And every individual reported missing is then sought by a family anxiously awaiting news of their loved one. These families cannot be left in such a state of anguish. For the truth, however painful it may be, is preferable to the torture of uncertainty and false hope. In Bosnia and Herzegovina civilians were especially affected by a conflict in which belligerents pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing by expelling minority groups from certain regions. Thousands of people who disappeared in combat or were thrown into prison, summarily executed or massacred, are still being sought by their families.
1 1 Articles 15, 16 and 17 of the First Geneva Convention of 1949; Articles 122 and 123 of the Third Convention; Articles 26 and 136 to 140 of the Fourth Convention; and Articles 32, 33 and 34 of Additional Protocol I of 1977.
2 Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt's appointment to this post was confirmed by the United Nations Security Council shortly before the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina was signed in Paris on 14 December 1995. Just as IFOR, which is made up of NATO troops and Russian troops, is entrusted with implementing the military provisions of the Framework Agreement, so it is the task of the High Representative to implement the Agreement's provisions pertaining to civilians.
3 France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States.
4 Italy at the time of writing.
5 Manfred Nowak, who in 1994 was appointed by the UN Commission on Human Rights as the Expert in charge of the Special Process on Missing Persons in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia.
6 6 A database containing all pertinent medical information that can be obtained from families with missing relatives.
7 According to the forensic experts of the American organization, Physicians for Human Rights, who exhumed bodies for the International Criminal Tribunal that was set up following the horrific massacres in Rwanda, the success rate for identifying remains exhumed from a grave containing several hundred bodies is no higher than 10 to 20 per cent, providing a detailed ante mortern database is available.
