ZAGREB, Sept 3 (Hina) - Croatian Foreign Minister Tonino Picula and the commissioner of the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP), Wim Kok, on Tuesday signed a document on the registration of the ICMP in Croatia.
ZAGREB, Sept 3 (Hina) - Croatian Foreign Minister Tonino Picula and
the commissioner of the International Commission for Missing
Persons (ICMP), Wim Kok, on Tuesday signed a document on the
registration of the ICMP in Croatia. #L#
Thanks to years of experience, Croatia has developed its own model
of tracing missing persons, which includes new search procedures,
exhumations, and the identification of missing persons, Minister
Picula said. He added Croatia was willing to share this
experience.
Croatia started out by looking for almost 18,000 missing persons
and has reduced the figure to 1,348, said Picula.
Although it has been registered in Croatia only now, Kok said the
ICMP had excellent relations with Croatia way back in 1996. He is
confident the agreement signed today would strengthen ICMP-Croatia
relations.
Kok said the issue of missing persons following the conflicts in
Europe's south-east in 1991 was one of the saddest episodes of
Europe's post-World War Two history. As a consequence of those
conflicts and the later one in Kosovo, the fate of around 40,000
remains unknown, he added.
Since 1996 the ICMP has been helping the Croatian government in
shedding light on the fate of missing persons. Probably the most
significant recent contribution to the tracing of the missing has
been the pressure the ICMP has exerted on the Yugoslav government to
start exhumations in the Vojvodina province, where some 320 persons
gone missing after the 1991-2 conflicts in Vukovar, Croatia, were
buried, said Kok.
The ICMP has been helping the Croatian government financially as
well, donating photofluorographic and other sophisticated DNA
analysis equipment, which has facilitated the identification
process.
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