Around 100,000 people died as a result of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 until 1995. In the wider region, the Yugoslav war caused around 130,000 deaths.
Of some 40,000 who disappeared during the Yugoslav wars, around 30,000 were later identified, largely through the work of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Missing Persons Institute, working in cooperation with the ICMP.
The ICMP was created at the G7 summit in 1996 to assist governments from the Western Balkans in locating the missing. Its work stayed mostly focused there until 2004, when it started to work globally. To date, ICMP has been involved, among others, in Armenia, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine.
In 2016, the ICMP started to collect data on disappearances in Syria, operating mostly from neighbouring Turkey and its headquarters in The Hague. Its database, which holds the testimonies of around 80,000 relatives, accounts today for 30,000 of the missing.
“When I think now, 30 years later, about the experience of Bosnia-Herzegovina and former Yugoslavia, I’m happy to hear that this region was able to identify so many of the missing,” Jalkhi notes.
However, he adds, even with all the international help that the region received, it took years to identify that number. “How long will it take us to resolve the issue [in Syria] of probably hundreds of thousands of missing persons?” he asks.
Time may be running out
The UN estimates that around 130,000 people are missing in Syria. The number rises to 180,000, according to the latest annual report of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, published in August. Jalkhi says the final number might be even higher, as many people, fearing reprisals, have still not announced the disappearance of relatives.
Since the fall of the Assad regime, investigators and human rights groups have uncovered extensive evidence of mass graves across Syria, and more and more are emerging each month.
A Reuters investigation, published in October, revealed that the old government secretly exhumed and relocated bodies from known sites near Damascus as part of an operation to conceal the scale of the killings. The report identified at least 34 new trenches dug in the desert near Dhumair, possibly containing tens of thousands of victims. Civil defence teams have continued to find human remains in basements and shallow graves in the towns surrounding Damascus.
Forensic experts warn that time is running out to preserve these sites properly. The lessons from Bosnia are stark: once remains are disturbed or poorly catalogued, the chances of accurate identification decrease.
“What we’ve learned from the trip in Bosnia,” Jalkhi says, “is that mistakes in the first stages of this process of excavation will lead to many, many errors and many problems in the process down the line”.
In Syria, where some mass graves have already been tampered with or moved, even small procedural mistakes could erase critical evidence for both families and courts. Acting quickly and precisely is not just a moral imperative, but a technical one: delay may make the identification process far more expensive – or mean that thousands of those missing are not identified at all.
But Syria’s missing are not only bodies buried in the soil. Thousands more disappeared beyond its borders: refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean or vanished along migration routes across the Balkans towards Europe.
Jalkhi says the NCMP is also moving on that front. “We’ve met with families of those who went missing [on their way to Europe] in Lebanon, Turkey and we’re planning visits next month to Germany and France to meet some of them there,” he says.
Asked about how the Commission plans to reach Syrians abroad, Jalkhi said several options are under consideration. One is to create contact points within Syrian consulates and embassies, though that approach risks accusations of politicisation. Another is to establish independent offices outside diplomatic premises, an option limited by funding. A third alternative could involve joint projects with organisations already active in host countries.
“We’re working systematically because the primary goal is to avoid the politicisation [of the topic] at any level, either nationally or internationally,” he says.
