What became known as the Mazowiecki Report singled out the plight of Bosnia Muslim (Bosniak) population whose fate was described as, “particularly tragic” because “they [felt] that they [were] threatened with extermination.”
The report urged the creation of a commission to determine the fate of the individuals who disappeared.
By 1994, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) received information on 11,000 cases of disappearances in the former Yugoslavia. That year a Special Process on Missing Persons in the Territory of the former Yugoslavia, led by Manfred Nowak, was set up with a joint mandate of the special rapporteur to determine the fate of the missing and coordinate efforts to excavate mass graves.
Mazowiecki later resigned in protest over the international community’s anemic response to atrocities in Bosnia, Srebrenica in particular. His resignation letter contained a stunning rebuke of the UN.
“These events constitute a turning point in the development of the situation in Bosnia,” he wrote.
“At one and the same time, we are dealing with the struggle of a State, a member of the United Nations, for its survival and multiethnic character, and with the endeavor to protect principles of international order. One cannot speak about the protection of human rights with credibility when one is confronted with the lack of consistency and courage displayed by the international community and its leaders.”
This was not the first condemnation from an UN official.
Early warning signs
A 1993 UN Security Council report written by Venezuelan UN Ambassador and then Security Council President Diego Arria after a field mission to the UN enclave described what was happening in Srebrenica as “slow-motion genocide“.
The need to account for persons missing in conflict is enshrined in International Humanitarian Law (IHL). The Fourth Geneva Convention implicitly requires that parties to a conflict facilitate inquiries about individuals missing as a result of hostilities.
Motivated by the rights of families, the additional Protocol 1 explicitly “requires each party to the conflict to search for persons who have been reported missing by the adverse party.”
During the war, the issue of missing persons was the responsibility of local Red Cross chapters and eventually handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Missing persons are initially recorded by a tracing request, which documents the circumstances where the person in question was last seen.
ICRC set up and chaired a Working Group on Missing Persons in 1996. Its lists were an important initial source of information about Bosnia’s missing.
By the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 that ended the war, around 100,000 people had perished, a figure that included over 27,000 missing persons. Of those, Srebrenica missing represented a challenge for identification efforts as bodies were disinterred and transferred to secondary graves months after the atrocities to hide evidence of the crimes.
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Lara J. Nettelfield | Radio Free (2020-07-11T07:33:34+00:00) Twenty-five years after the Srebrenica Genocide. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/11/twenty-five-years-after-the-srebrenica-genocide/
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