The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) announced Wednesday it had passed a major milestone in identifying persons missing from the wars in the former Yugoslavia. ICMP has generated DNA profiles from bone samples for over 10,000 individuals, representing about one third of all the war missing across the region.”This is a major achievement, and unique in the history of identification of missing persons and of forensic science,” explained Adnan Rizvić, Deputy Director of ICMP’s Forensic Sciences Department. ” When we started working with DNA – just two years ago – to identify missing persons from the war, people told us it would never be feasible to use DNA on such a large scale, or that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to do what we have now done – for a fraction of that cost,” he said.

The ICMP has obtained DNA profiles on some 12,000 bone…

Family members of the missing and victims’ groups feel it is still too early to convene a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Bosnia Herzegovina, they told participants at a two-day conference on “Mechanisms for Truth Seeking and Documentation,” organized by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) to encourage an exchange of views on possible steps towards reconciliation.”The family members and other participants at the conference clearly agreed that the first priority should be to clarify the fate of the missing, to exhume the remains and to identify them and give them a decent burial,” said Asta Zinbo, ICMP’s Director of Civil Society Initiatives Program.

ICMP organized the conference so that families associations and victims groups could be better informed about the truth and reconciliation process and so they could share their views and opinions. “Our goal was to create an opportunity for these groups talk to each other and…