Missing Lives

Missing Lives brings together fifteen, heartbreaking stories from the Balkans – stories that tell of the immense tragedy that took place between 1991 and 2001 during the Yugoslav Wars when tens of thousands of Europeans vanished. Desperate for news, families of the missing prayed for a message, begged for the truth and often fell prey to blackmail. In almost every case, those missing had been murdered. But without any word, witness or body, the bereaved could not accept their loss. Their torment was to last years – for many it still continues. Children waited for parents to return from the grave. Mothers made up their dead son’s beds. Old men couldn’t bury their descendants. The living also ‘lost’ their lives.

For the first time in war DNA has been used to match blood and bone, reuniting families divided by death, enabling survivors to find closure and to begin to live again. Since 1991 the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Balkans has been asked by families to trace 34,384 missing men and women. The remains of half of them – most of whom were murdered over a decade ago – have now been found. Missing Lives gives a voice to the unacknowledged suffering of these families, to all who went missing ‘by force’, and reminds us that in war there is no greater loss than the disappearance of those we love.