Bones and Recognition: Compensating Families of Missing Persons in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

A growing trend in post-war transitional justice posits that structural conditions explain why only some post-war countries award material assistance to survivors of war atrocities. While these explanations provide critical insights into the processes behind compensation adoption across post-war states, they do not explain the great variance in which victims obtain compensation within post-war countries. Using the case of missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a victim category that secured compensation in 2004, I present a new model to explain compensation using a rationalist approach. The paper shows that compensation adoption is primarily driven by an opportune combination of three factors: international salience (defined as the international attention given to the victim category and/or prioritisation of its demands), moral authority (defined as the level of perceived domestic deservingness for compensation) and mobilisation resources (defined as the victim category’s capacities to mobilise and the quality of its networks). Drawing on fieldwork, this article shows that the prominence of the Srebrenica genocide propelled the issue of missing persons on to domestic and external agendas, affording the surviving families an opportunity to demand special compensation.

Keywords:

• compensation
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• missing people
• transitional justice
• Srebrenica
• International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP)
• socio-economic rights

Notes

1 The interviews were conducted with the approval of the university’s Social Science Ethics Committee and are securely stored with the author. I use a generic identifier for the interviewed individuals.

2 According to Tabeau and Zwierzchowski (2010), the number is 104,732.

3 Official Gazette of BiH No. 50/04, 9 November 2004.

4 Prosecutor vs. Krstić, IT-98-33. See at http://www.icty.org/case/krstic/4, accessed 20 July 2017.

5 The Dutch government calculated that from 1996 to 2002, Srebrenica benefited from nearly 34 million Euro.

6 The ICMP-developed DNA method was used to identify the Grenfell Tower victims.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessie Hronešová

JESSIE HRONEŠOVÁ is a DPhil candidate in politics at the University of Oxford. She focuses on peacebuilding, transitional justice and democratisation, with a special focus on the Balkans. She is the author of Everyday Ethno-National Identities of Young People in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2012).