Blood collection teams from the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) will be visiting Basel, Baar, Geneva, and Yverdon in Switzerland from July 1 to July 3 to collect blood samples from family members of persons missing from the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.The blood samples are needed for DNA identification of remains found in grave sites across the former Yugoslavia. Since the year 2000, ICMP has collected over 71,180 blood samples from family members, relating to 25,721 missing individuals from the region. As DNA is used to trace genetic links with family members, samples are needed from several family members for each missing person. Of the missing persons on its database, ICMP has already found DNA matches for 7,706 individuals.

ICMP is actively collecting blood samples from family members, and as there are large numbers of refugees living in other countries, ICMP extended its outreach campaign last year to…

The Government of Greece has once again joined the donor governments of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), making a financial contribution towards equipping the newly-established ICMP Re-association Center in Lukavac, eastern Bosnia.During the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, remains of victims buried in mass graves were often separated and “commingled” when the perpetrators of killings tried to hide evidence of their crimes by digging up the bodies and re-burying them in secondary mass graves. At the ICMP Re-association Center, skeletal remains of the missing are put back together using a combination of archaeological information, anthropological work and a method whereby a limited DNA profile is generated to allow for re-association of separated body parts. In this way, the ICMP Re-association Center is helping to ensure that more individuals are accounted for and that the process of re-association does not further delay the identification of remains and their return…

One month before the 10th anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica in 1995, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has completed identifications of more than 2,000 of the Srebrenica victims. There are altogether almost 7,800 persons listed on the ICMP database of the missing from Srebrenica, and, as family members continue to report missing relatives and donate blood samples for DNA identification, that number is slowly growing. Many of the missing have not yet been exhumed from mass graves that are still hidden around the country.

On Thursday morning, Dr. Rifat Kesetovic, ICMP’s Chief Forensic Pathologist and also the official court-appointed pathologist for Srebrenica cases, signed the 2,000th Srebrenica-related death certificate at the ICMP morgue in Tuzla, about 60 kilometers from Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia.

“We still have a very, very long way to go in this process,” said Dr. Kesetovic, whose staff left the ICMP facility after the death…