Explanation Sought for Missing Christians
About 60,000 Dutch Christians have signed a petition calling on the Muslim, Croatian and Serbian leaders of Bosnia for a clarification on the status of the nearly 20,000 people still unaccounted for after the end of the war in Bosnia.
“In spite of the international pressure to look and to focus on rebuilding the country, for those who have lost a loved one, it is very important to find out what happened to that person,” said Heleen Kleijn-Jonker, coordinator of the Dutch campaign and staff member of the Mission and World Service agency of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands.
“If this does not get priority, it will stand in the way of reconciliation,” she added. “You can’t have peace without justice.”
The petition also calls on the Bosnian government to cooperate with international efforts to bring to trial those responsible for the “disappearances.”
On Wednesday, investigators from the international war crimes tribunal investigating crimes of genocide in Bosnia came across what they said are the bodies of some of the 7,500 Muslim men missing from Srebrenica, the one-time United Nations-declared “safe haven” for Muslims that was captured by Bosnian Serbs near the end of the war. It is widely believed the captured Muslims were massacred and their bodies hidden by the Serbs.
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