Director of the Republika Srpska Reserch Centre of War, War Crimes and Tracing Missing Persons, Milorad Kojic, believes that it is possible to initiate the deadpoint of the process of tracing missing persons of Serb nationality in BiH, but before it happens, it is necessary to reform the management structure of the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“By this reform, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) would leave the role of the co-founder of the BiH Missing Persons Institute, and the BiH Council of Ministers would assume full competence over the Institute,” Kojic told SRNA.
He has stressed that the current state of the Institute is fully unsustainable, because the principle of consensus is not respected, and the legitimacy of acts passed by the Institute management structure is questioned, bearing in mind the fact that the mandate of the management members, except the Serb members, has expired.
Kojic, who on behalf of Republika Srpska was a member of the former Working Group tasked to amend the Agreement on assuming the role of the co-founders of the Missing Persons Institute, has said that the BiH Council of Ministers should form a new Working group in order to try again to reach an agreement on the Institute management structure reform.
Kojic has said that, while being a member of the Working Group, his position was that Srpska should participate more in the selection of the Board of Directors, and the Steering and the Supervisory Boards of the Institute.
He added that it was not possible to reach an agreement in the former Working Group, as the Federation of BiH intends to fully centralise the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina in a way to abolish the Board of Directors and the Steering and the Supervisory Boards of the Institute.
“Republika Srpska finds this unacceptable, because in this way the search for missing persons of Serb nationality would be in even more difficult position,” Kojic has concluded.
The co-founders of the Missing Persons Institute are the BiH Council of Ministers and the International Commission on Missing Persons, which earlier expressed its intention to leave the founding treaty and to shift the tracing missing persons process to the Council of Ministers.
Source: SRNA
