Survivors’ organizations, family members, and RS officials observed the Day of the Missing Serbs from Sarajevo and Romanija region today, with a service held in Milijevici. Some of those present expressed frustration with the Missing Persons Institute and with BiH authorities for allegedly neglecting or deliberately delaying investigations and efforts to identify the bodies of missing Serbs.
“Twenty-three years have passed since the first Sarajevo Serbs went missing and we mark those tragic events as a memory of the first mass disappearance of so-called ‘group eight.’ They went missing in one day and earthly remains of six of them have never been found,” says Mirko Vranic, the head of the Regional Coordination of the Association of Families of Detained and Fallen Veterans and Missing Civilians of Istocno Sarajevo.
Vranic notes that on this day all other disappearances of Serbs in the region, who are still searched for, are marked as well.
The process of searching for and identifying of the missing was satisfactory until 2008, he underlined, and more than 320 Serbs were identified per year, but since the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina was formed, he said, only 58 Serbs were identified, who were exhumed by the former Commission for Tracing the Missing of Republika Srpska.
“This is a repeated crime against the missing Serbs or how else do we explain the fact that the Institute covers up an identified person for a year and refuses to tell the family so they can bury them with dignity, because the Institute is waiting for those families to biologically disappear,” said Vranic.
