For the first time, the highest representatives of the Republic of Macedonia, the International Community and the representatives of families of missing persons have met in one place to discuss common issues.

Today in Skopje the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) organized a Conference on ‘The Right to Know’, making it possible for the Government's representatives and members of the families of arrested, kidnapped and otherwise missing persons to define together how to implement the Document that was adopted on 24th June 2003 by the Parliament of the Republic of Macedonia. The Document defined a need to establish a Commission on the Determination of the Fate of Kidnapped and Missing Persons in the Republic of Macedonia who disappeared during the crisis in 2001.

The Commission would consist of members of the Macedonian Parliament, members of the Government of Republic of Macedonia, one representative…

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, based in Michigan, has approved a grant of US$ 150,000 to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) Civil Society Initiatives department for its work supporting Associations of Families of Missing Persons in the former Yugoslavia.ICMP believes that family members of the missing are central to its work and that family associations play a critical role in addressing the missing persons issue through advocacy, education, data collection and raising public awareness. ICMP works with all ethnic/religious groups seeking missing loved ones resulting from the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, 1991 to 1995 and 1998 to 1999. Recently, activities have been expanded to include work in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Associations of Families of Missing Persons in the former Yugoslavia have taken on important tasks of addressing their own and their members’ personal tragedies, but they also have the potential to be actively engaged…

ICMP announced today, the 8th Anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre that, the 1,000th Srebrenica missing person has been identified. An additional 676 cases have found a DNA match with the family blood samples and are currently waiting to be confirmed and certified as closed cases. The number of both DNA matches and closed cases is increasing daily as a result of additional DNA profiles being obtained from both recovered bodies as well as family blood samples.Gordon Bacon, Chief of Staff of ICMP, welcomed this achievement: ” This is an important milestone for ICMP in helping families who lost their loved ones during the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995 but there is still a long way to go. Everyone involved in the process must continue the work of finding remains and giving back names to the thousands of persons still missing. All of us at ICMP are dedicated to…

The experience gained in finding and identifying the thousands of missing in former Yugoslavia could be valuable in assisting the authorities in Iraq address the issue of missing persons there. James Kimsey, Chairman of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and a delegation of senior ICMP staff, have just returned from an assessment visit to Iraq and are ready to make recommendations to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which is the government authority currently responsible for administering Iraq.The objective of the visit of the ICMP delegation was to assess whether ICMP's experience gained working on the missing persons issue in the former Yugoslavia could be valuable in addressing the issue in Iraq, where there are an estimated 300,000 persons missing as a consequence of decades of enforced disappearance and other human rights abuses perpetrated by Saddam Hussein's regime.

During their visit to Iraq, Mr. Kimsey and the ICMP staff…