The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is launching an initiative by the families of the missing persons on August 10 to install boxes for anonymous notes and launch a helpline to contact people who may have any information about the fate and whereabouts of the missing, the ICRC press service told IA “Res”.
“The population of the villages where the disappearance of people allegedly took place in connection with the armed conflicts of the 1990s and 2008, possible eyewitnesses of some events may still have verified information that could help in the search for the missing,” said the Head of the Department providing protection to the ICRC Mission Nikita Logachev. “This is an initiative of the families of the missing persons, their pain of many years of waiting and a call to all who may have at least some information about the fate of their missing loved ones.”
Until August 30, by the International Day of the Missing, in several villages of South Ossetia, with the assistance of rural and district administrations and South Ossetian participants in the Coordination Mechanism, it is planned to install 15 boxes, accompanied by a banner with a brief explanation of the purpose of installing such a communication channel and a list of persons allegedly missing in in the vicinity of a particular village or neighboring villages.. The information on the banner, among other things, contains the appeal of families in several languages (Russian, Ossetian and Georgian): “We, the families of the missing persons, ask you to help us in searching for information about the fate and whereabouts of our missing relatives. If you know at least something about them, please share this information in the form of an anonymous note or call the helpline. Any information is very important to us."
The contents of the mailbox will be checked on the 20th of each month, and two numbers are allocated for the helpline for calls during working hours from 9:00 to 18:00 from Monday to Friday: +7 929 803 30 11 – the line allocated to the office of the Plenipotentiary Representative for post-conflict settlement, +7 929 803 30 22 is the number where calls will be received by the staff of the ICRC Mission.
All information collected within the framework of the initiative will be analyzed and systematized jointly with the South Ossetian participants of the Coordination Mechanism for Clarification of the Fate of Persons Missing in Connection with the Armed Conflicts of the 1990s and 2008. The information gathering process is purely humanitarian in nature and none of the data collected will be used to find those responsible or prosecute them. The sole purpose is to provide an answer to the families of the missing persons about the fate and whereabouts of their relatives.
Finding out the fate and whereabouts of missing persons is a long and painstaking process, and its success largely depends on the ability to obtain reliable information about the circumstances of the disappearance and the whereabouts of the missing person.
