International Commission on Missing Persons

In May 1999, in the midst of the Kosovo war, Serbia's assistant interior minister Obrad Stevanovic made a grim note in his diary while he was having a meeting with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Under the capital-letter heading "PRESIDENT", Stevanovic wrote: "No body, no crime."

A cooperation agreement intended to boost efforts to find the remains of thousands of people who went missing under Albania's repressive Communist regime was signed on Thursday by the head of the State Police, Gledis Nano, and Gentiana Sula, president of the Authority for Information on Former State Security Documents, AIDSSH.

The International Commission on Missing Persons told BIRN on Tuesday that experts have confirmed the identities of two people whose remains were found in a mass grave in the village of Kizevak in southern Serbia.

The International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP said in a report published on Tuesday that Albanian prosecutors are still not issuing orders to exhume suspected mass grave sites where people who went missing during the Communist era could be buried.

The Albanian government agreed with the ICMP to start the search in 2018, after eight years of negotiations.

Matthew Holliday of the International Commission on Missing Persons speaks to media on Thursday. Photo: Gjergj Erebara/BIRN.

"Today I am pleased to announce that ICMP early this week submitted two DNA match reports at the Institute of Forensic Medicine of the Republic of Albania," Matthew Holliday, head of the Western Balkans Programme at the ICMP, told journalists.

However, associations of families of missing persons argue that the Bosnian Missing Persons Institute, the International Commission on Missing Persons and the Bosnian state prosecution should have found more of the remaining missing persons by now.

Police and security services 'concealing information'

This week in Poznan, in western Poland, the countries of the Berlin Process, an initiative designed to foster stronger ties between the Western Balkans and the European Union, are meeting to review progress since their last meeting a year ago in London.

In the last 20 years, governments in the Western Balkans have been able to account for more than 70 per cent of the 40,000 people who were missing at the end of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Almost 28,000 have been accounted for, which is an unprecedented achievement following a large-scale conflict anywhere in the world.

The International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP on Friday called on families of victims of Communism to visit its office in Tirana and give blood samples that can be used for the identification of their relatives' remains if they are found.

The International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP is still awaiting parliamentary ratification of the Albanian Council of Ministers' decision on June 7 to start work on the search for missing victims of the Communist regime.

A spokesperson for the ICMP confirmed that the organisation is still waiting for final approval.