Verica Tomanovic holds up a flyer as she talks about her Serb husband who disappeared in Kosovo more than a decade ago.
“This man went missing. If you know his whereabouts, please call KFOR or 92 [the police],” the flyer says.
Andrija Tomanovic, the 62-year-old chief of surgery in Pristina’s hospital, disappeared in broad daylight on June 24, 1999, two weeks after the war ended and NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping forces controlled the area.
He is one of about 14,650 people unaccounted for after the wars in Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo, which tore apart the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Families throughout the western Balkans still hope to find out what has happened to their missing loved ones, if only to bury and grieve for them properly.
“On that day he called [from the hospital] ... and said he was going home and would call back in 10 minutes,” Tomanovic’s wife recalls.
“We haven’t heard from him since,” she adds in a whisper.
Immediately after he disappeared Verica, who was visiting her daughter in Belgrade at the time, spent frantic days and nights calling friends and colleagues in a desperate bid to locate her husband.
“Eleven years have passed and I still do not know where he is,” says the tearful woman, dressed in black, as she and scores of other families prepared to mark the International Day of the Disappeared yesterday.
The problem of missing persons has remained a huge obstacle to reconciliation in the Balkans and has prevented the region moving on from its bloody past, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Paul-Henri Arni, the Belgrade-based head of ICRC’s regional delegation, calculates that 15,000 missing people affects the lives of another 200,000 people who still search for their loved ones.
“Now you have a political problem, with 200,000 people. In some areas you don’t have conditions for regional cooperation or reconciliation,” Arni says.
To highlight the issue the ICRC has launched “Missing Lives,” a book and exhibition telling the stories of 15 people whose loved ones went missing in the Balkans wars.
“We wanted to put faces on statistics to show that right now people are suffering a hell of a lot,” Arni says. “It is a suffering different from others. It is the only suffering that gets worse with time.”
It took several years before Tonka Pezelj of Croatia found out what had happened to her husband Miljenko, a judge and president of a district court in the Croatian town of Petrinja.
She said in the book that she begged him to leave the town before the rebel Serbs took control, but he refused, saying it was his duty to stay in Petrinja.
After the takeover she lost contact with her husband and spent years asking everyone she could think of, from the ICRC and European observers to UN peacekeepers and even the Serb military authorities, for any information about him.
It was only when the Croatian army regained control over Petrinja three years later that she was able to go back and discovered that he had been killed by local Serb forces after months of house arrest early in the 1991-1995 war.
Tonka said she finally found peace when she reburied her husband, who had been entombed in a local cemetery, in the family grave site.
“There is an extraordinary similarity between the stories, be they Serb, Bosnian, Albanian, Croat... same feelings, same people and the same tragedies,” the ICRC’s Arni says.
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