Well over 2,000 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015 and untold numbers have perished crossing the Sahara en route to ports in Libya and elsewhere. The statistics on missing migrants constitute a horrific backdrop to activities organized to mark the International Day of the Disappeared.

And the numbers of those who go missing on dangerous migration routes – across the Mexican-US border, for example, or south from the Bay of Bengal – are dwarfed by the numbers of those who are disappearing in parts of Central Africa, in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and other conflict zones, not to mention the thousands who are victims of enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killings as a result of repressive government or paramilitary policies.

“The International Day of the Disappeared is an appropriate occasion on which to recall that the issue of missing persons represents a global challenge that requires a global solution,” ICMP Director-General…

Activists in towns and cities across Bosnia and Herzegovina organized street events today to highlight the issue of missing persons. In addition to Sarajevo, Prijedor, Ilijas, Vogosca, Travnik, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Ozren, Mostar and Brcko, related events were organized in Belgrade, Zagreb, Pakrac, and Pristina.

ICMP in cooperation with the Network for Building Peace and the Association for Social Research and Communication presented a “living sculpture” in the center of Sarajevo. This comprised installations designed by family members of the missing to represent their loves ones. The event highlighted key messages related to the missing persons issue:

• Demand truth and justice
• This concerns you too
• Report mass grave sites

– More than 30,000 people were missing in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of the war
– 70 percent of the missing have been accounted for
– We are still looking for more than 8,000 of our fellow citizens

Members of the public were invited to sign a petition calling on…