A panel discussion held after the database presentation and film screening. Photo: BIRN.
BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina launched a database of children missing from the 1992-95 war in the country and staged a premiere of the new documentary Rodjeni ali ne postoje (The Unlived Lives) on Thursday in the capital, Sarajevo.
The database was presented at an event, “Children Missing in War – 30 Years Later, What Next?” It contains the cases of 35 children who went missing during the 1992-95 war, as well as testimonials from parents and family members who are still looking for them.
“Each day, it becomes harder to obtain information. We even paid for information about grave sites. The work of state institutions is extremely slow,” Fikret Bacic, a father from the northern town of Prijedor who has been searching for his two missing children since the war, told a panel discussion after the presentation.
According to the Bosnian Institute for Missing Persons, 1,297 minors went missing in Bosnia during the war, of whom 372 are still being sought.
“We are striving to give this issue priority, to ensure that the institutions searching for the missing are provided with all necessary resources. Unfortunately, that is not the case at the moment. We are forced to operate with minimal means. Still, over the past two years, we have carried out exhumations in which children were found,” Emza Fazlic, from the Institute for Missing Persons, told the panel.
Jasmin Begic, a journalist with BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina who worked on the database and directed The Unlived Lives, said that the stories of parents searching for their children were recorded over the course of a year.
“We created stories with the parents or relatives of 35 children, which will be available in our database, and we also filmed a half-hour documentary that explores the search, the emotions, and the hope of the parents that they will find their children,” Begic said.
The documentary tells the story of three parents from different parts of Bosnia whose newborn babies disappeared without a trace, and their attempts to find them.
They speak about their hopes of one day finding their children alive or at least discovering their burial sites, as well as the emotional stories they have passed on to their other children, hoping they will continue the search for their siblings in the future if necessary.
Reaching the parents was not easy, Begic noted. In some cases, entire families were killed, leaving no one to testify about the missing children, while others have moved abroad or have since died.
A TV premiere of the film is also set for Thursday on N1 Bosnia and Herzegovina at 8pm CET. The database is available here.