During a brief trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez of California visited an International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) mortuary and examination facility in Tuzla, eastern Bosnia on Sunday, 19 March. The ICMP facility houses thousands of body bags containing the remains of victims of the 1995 fall of Srebrenica.Dr. Rifat Kesetovic, Chief Forensic Pathologist at the facility, which is called the Podrinje Identification Project, explained to Congresswoman Sanchez that many of the body bags in the morgue contain only parts of individuals, or parts of several different individuals. The problem of separation and mixing of body parts occurred because several months after the Srebrenica victims were buried in mass graves, the perpetrators dug up the remains and reburied them in smaller mass graves in an attempt to hide the evidence. Heavy machinery was used and the bodies broke apart and became commingled during the process. This makes the…

The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has hired Thomas J. Parsons, formerly Chief Scientist at the U.S. Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, as Director of its Forensic Sciences Department. Dr. Parsons took up his post at ICMP’s Sarajevo headquarters on March 1, 2006. He replaces Dr. Mark Skinner, who has returned to his post as professor at the Archaeology Department of Simon Fraser University in Canada.

The first Directors of the Missing Persons Institute (MPI) of Bosnia-Herzegovina officially took up their posts today, marking a major step forward in the search for persons missing from the country’s 1992-95 conflict.The MPI is a State-level organization co-founded by the BiH Council of Ministers and the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), which is taking over the responsibilities of the entity-level missing persons organizations – the Office of the Republika Srpska on Tracing Detained and Missing Persons and the Federation Commission on Tracing Missing Persons. There are three Directors of the MPI: Marko Jurisic and Amor Masovic, Chairmen of the Federation commission, and Milan Bogdanic, Director of the RS office on missing persons. Marko Jurisic took over today as the first MPI Chairman, a position that will rotate every eight months between the current three MPI Directors.