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The Government of the Republic of Serbia

In the service of citizens

Serbian government committed to solving problem of missing persons

Belgrade, 25 December 2012

Chairman of the Serbian government’s Commission for the Missing Persons Veljko Odalovic stated today that approximately 13,000 persons from the territory of the former Yugoslavia are still missing and that the resolution of this issue is crucial for good relations and stability in the region.

Veljko Odalovic

Odalovic said at a press conference that the Serbian government is committed to finding the whereabouts of the missing, which is one of the preconditions for stabilisation of relations in the region.

He recalled that Serbia has agreements on cooperation in this field with Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro and underlined that our country meets the requirements of other countries and that it expects the same treatment.

According to him, some actors in the region have a selective approach to solving this issue so the Serbian side is not able to obtain new information on locations at which Serbian victims are buried.

Speaking about Kosovo-Metohija, more than 1,500 cases of the missing were resolved in the last seven years and another 1,800 persons in this territory are registered as missing, Odalovic stated.

Another 2,300 are registered as missing in Croatia and several hundreds of those missing have still not been registered in official documents.

Odalovic specified that two big exhumations were carried out this year, in Donji Rajac where 28 bodies were found and in Sibenik, where 31 bodies were exhumed.

Speaking about Bosnia-Herzegovina, 97 Serbian citizens are registered as missing who are mostly soldiers, i.e. these are the bodies of soldiers from Tuzla troops, the Chairman of the Commission for Missing Persons specified.

He added that there are 350 well-known graves in Croatia that have still not been exhumed and that Pristina has not provided any information regarding graves in the territory of Kosovo, while Serbia took part in exhumations at 265 sites this year. Odalovic pointed out that another problem is that around 5,000 bodies, which have still not been identified. are placed in morgues in Zagreb, Tuzla, Pristina and other cities.