| Planning on sweeping the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea for whatever is left of the drowned? |
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...At a meeting of the International Commission for Missing Persons in The Hague this week, Cyprus, Greece and Malta pledged to coordinate and beef up their efforts to trace nearly 18,500
"This crab tastes...Africanny?"
Italia -- which has taken a hard line on
The four countries are the main point of entry to Europe for many of the
Born out of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and set up in 1996 in Sarajevo by then US president Bill Clinton
...former Democratic president of the U.S. Bill was the second U.S. president to be impeached, the first to deny that oral sex was sex, the first to have difficulty with the definition of is...
, the ICMP uses increasingly sophisticated DNA technology to trace missing persons.
It has already succeeded in identifying around 70 percent of the 40,000 people who went missing in the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s, including around 90 percent of the nearly 8,000 killed in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
But it is now turning its attention to one of the biggest human catastrophes of recent times -- the migration crisis that has hit the Middle East, North Africa and Europe since 2014.
The plan to better locate and identify missing
But this week's meeting of the southern European states was key to pushing the process forward.
Top ICMP representatives nevertheless called for more to be done to help find the missing
"What we are implicitly saying to states is that they have a responsibility to deal with this, but that it is also in their interest to deal with it," former Dutch foreign minister Bert Koenders told AFP.
The ICMP also wants to obtain permission from Syria's neighbours to start mapping the thousands of refugees fleeing the bitter eight-year war -- in a move that could one day help identify war crimes, Queen Noor said.
Collecting and having access to data about these refugees will make it easier in future to identify "where crimes may have occurred, where mass graves exist -- and where families and relatives may be," she said.
But the longer-term aim is to bring millions of displaced people back to their homes.
"I can see in a future that is hopefully not too far off that we can set in motion steps that will provide greater hope for many of the
"To give them hope that they can return home," she said.