Odalovic: Declaration on the Missing Persons gives new hope to the families; urgently call a meeting of the Working Group

The head of the Commission for Missing Persons in the Government of Serbia, Veljko Odalovic, believes that after the adoption of the Declaration on Missing Persons in Brussels, it is necessary to urgently convene a meeting of the Working Group for Missing Persons, which last met on April 16, 2021, in order to agree on activities and further searches terrain.

Odalovic emphasizes that the Declaration on the Missing Persons gives new hope to the families, because this is primarily a humanitarian issue, and as he points out, it gives us an additional obligation in the search for the remains of persons who are still missing.

The head of the Commission for Missing Persons in the Government of Serbia states that the Working Group did not meet for more than two years because it was Pristina that was supposed to schedule the next meeting, and in the meantime, it insisted on the term "enforced disappearances", which was not included in the final text of the Declaration.

"That is why President Vucic attached a statement to the Declaration explaining that the term 'forcibly disappeared' is not strictly a legal term, but that it emphasizes the circumstances under which a person disappeared so that there are no legal consequences," Odalovic says, and continues,

"The declaration derailed the process, and some solutions are such that we have no problem to start working immediately. That is what we hope for and the most important thing is that together with Pristina we start the search for the missing persons. Now it is important that the Working Group meets urgently and agrees on the activities because we should first of all work on the ground. We have enough information to immediately start searching certain locations," Odalovic says.

Our interlocutor points out that, in addition to the nine locations that Pristina is currently refusing to search, and which are suspected of containing the remains of the Serbs, Belgrade could soon request a search of 15 more locations in Kosovo, where bodies of kidnapped and killed Serbs could also be found.