ICRC says around 5,000 missing in Karabakh conflict, including 1,000 Armenians

The issue of the missing persons of the Karabakh conflict is among the priorities of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), ICRC Armenia Communications and Prevention Manager Zara Amatuni told Armenpress.

“We have been dealing with this issue in relation to the Karabakh conflict in the region for over thirty years. This means we work in various directions. First of all, this is about the law guaranteed by the mandate pertaining not to ICRC obligations but to giving answers to the families of those missing by the authorities in relevant sides as to what happened to their relatives in relation to the hostilities. This is the requirement of international humanitarian law. We are working in this direction with the authorities of the sides in order to remind them about their obligations within the framework of the mandate and to maximally support them with our technical experience and certain skills that we have acquired during our work in similar situations,” Amatuni said.

She added that the second important direction of the ICRC’s work is to provide comprehensive and detailed information about each and every missing person.

“Based on the applications of the families, we collected through our offices in the region the data of around five thousand missing persons who are considered missing since the 90s and subsequently as a result of escalations of the conflict from 2020 until 2023. Around 1,000 of them are Armenians, whose data was collected by the ICRC through the offices in Yerevan and Karabakh. This number includes persons whose families consider them missing despite the existence of a positive DNA identification: there are families who do not accept the test results for various reasons. This is also a signal for us to work with authorities to try and determine the circumstances behind people not accepting these results,” Amatuni said, stressing that the ICRC does not independently carry out the identification process and the relevant authorities are in charge of it.