Lack of political will is the main reason for why Bosnia is still looking for 7,000 people that went missing during the war. This year, only 53 were exhumed and 170 identified, authorities said on Thursday, ahead of the International Day of the Missing.

Some 32,000 people went missing in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war and about 76 percent of them were found. The remains of 25,500 people were exhumed until now.

According to Marko Jurisic, from Bosnia’s Institute for Missing Persons, there is a lack of political will for finding the rest.

“Article 4 of the Law on Missing Persons states a legal obligation for all institutions and government bodies in Bosnia and Herzegovina to submit information on the locations of mass graves to the members of the families of the victims and institutions which deal with missing persons, which is the Institute for Missing Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” he said.

Apart from the Institute, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) also contributed to finding the remains of those missing in the country.

The head of ICMP’s Western Balkans Programme, Matthew Holiday, said that the organisation will not give up until all those missing are found, but also that a greater level of cooperation from Bosnia’s judicial institutions is necessary.

Investigators and organisations dealing with missing persons have access to international archives and databases, but the problem is that they don’t have access to the archives of some domestic institutions.

“Our request to the Defence Ministry for us to enter the archives, as we have certain indications that there could be documentation and information which could lead us to the location of mass graves, was denied. They tell us that we can only enter those archives through the Prosecutor’s Office,” according to the director of the Institute for Missing Persons, Amor Masovic.    

Bosnia has at least twice the number missing persons named in its archives as any other country in the region.