EON

Sarajevo (EON) – Canada is to provide financial support to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in searching for people missing after a decade of conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the Sarajevo-based ICMP said Tuesday.

Ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina David Hutchings, who led a Canadian delegation on a visit to the ICMP facilities in the northern Bosnian city of Tuzla on Monday, announced that Ottawa would donate more than 1.3 million Canadian dollars (1.15 million US dollar) for ICMP’s work in the former Yugoslavia.

“We want to be part of ICMP’s ongoing efforts to identify victims of the conflicts in the region and to help provide closure to their families,” Hutchings said.

ICMP, according to its director Kathryne Bomberger, “has made over 11,000 DNA-assisted identifications of persons missing from of the conflicts in the region.”

In Bosnia alone, ICMP has so far made more than 4,000 DNA-assisted identifications of the victims of the massacre in the former eastern Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb troops massacred up to 8,000 Muslim men in July 1995.

Some 17,500 people, according to ICMP, are still missing following the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, the ICMP said in a statement, leads with more than 13,000 persons still unaccounted for, in addition to some 2,400 persons still missing in Croatia and 2,200 missing after the conflict in Kosovo.