NGO: Former Socialist Republics Need To Stop Hiding Information on Mass Graves

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The RECOM Reconciliation Network NGO said on Aug. 31 that the question of missing persons in the former Yugoslav republics "is extremely politicized" and called on the governments of these countries to stop their policy of hiding information and documents on mass and individual graves.

In a statement on the International Day of the Disappeared, RECOM said that a culture of public silence on massacres and murders after which the bodies of the victims disappeared was being created in the former Yugoslav republics and that this meant that "the decisive physical symbol of remembering the dead has been disappearing."

"RECOM recalls that not all of the mortal remains of 1,608 people killed in the region of Srebrenica in July 1995, 370 in Vukovar in November 1992, 50 in Kraljane in Kosovo in April 1999, 16 in Dojnice after international forces entered Kosovo have been found yet. Among the missing (11,364) the majority are men aged from 30 to 50 and over 1,000 women and children," a statement said.

RECOM called on the governments of the post-Yugoslav countries, national institutions and missing persons commissions to stop the policy of hiding documents on graves, the intentional protraction of exhumations at known mass grave sites and to solve the problem of identifying the mortal remains in morgues.