peace- and justice-based institutions
like the International Criminal Court—
reflecting the expansion of its mission.
Today it employs more than 140 people
and is called on for any event where large
numbers have gone missing— Hurricane
Katrina, the 2004 Asian tsunami, the
MH 17 crash over Ukraine, the Cali-
fornia wildfires and the recent wars in
Syria and Iraq. But its newest endeavor,
identifying lost asylum seekers across
Europe , may be one of the hardest yet.
“It is unprecedented,” says Kathryne
Bomberger, director- general of the
ICMP. “Europe hasn’t experienced such a
large number of missing persons in a long
time, and they are missing migrants.” In
these politically volatile times, when na-
tionalist parties who’ve displayed little
outward concern for refugees have made
inroads across Europe, the ICMP’s task is
even more difficult.
“You can use the best technologies in
the world,” says Bomberger, who is Amer-
ican, “but the political will in the end is
what matters the most.”
The mechanics of the process are
simple in theory: the countries that have
found migrant bodies on their soil—
mostly southern European nations like
Italy, Greece, Malta and Spain—would
take DNA samples and any other iden-
tifying characteristics
and upload this informa-
tion to a centralized da-
tabase maintained by the
ICMP. Meanwhile, any-
one searching for a miss-
ing relative would fill in
a form and give a DNA
sample using a simple
saliva or pinprick blood
test that can be done at
home. The results of that
are uploaded to a second
database, and the two
data sets are then compared for matches.
But none of this can happen without
the full support of the governments in-
volved. The hundreds of thousands of ref-
ugees who survived the journey to Europe
are now facing a surge in support for far-
right leaders. For such politicians, “these
people [are] without value, and particu-
larly in death they deserve nothing from
us,” says Simon Robins, a researcher on
missing migrants with the University of
York’s Centre for Applied Human Rights.
“If you find a body in London on the
street, the authorities would make every
effort to identify it,” Robins says. But when
a body washes up on a beach in Greece
or Italy, “the fact that that person’s racial
origins suggest they may not be a citizen
means that no investigation is conducted.”
And relatives of those who died in the
Mediterranean have very little lobbying
power. Many of the shipwreck survivors
who make it to Europe are not able tovote. Family members in the countries
of origin are usually very poor or living
in war zones.
Bomberger says the ICMP started
pressuring governments to work on iden-
tifying missing migrants in 2011, when
the Arab Spring led to the first large
groups of refugees crossing the Mediter-
ranean in overcrowded boats, and death
tolls started to rise. The ICMP received
$400,000 from the Swiss government in
late 2017—just about enough money to
start the first phase of the project: bring-
ing Italy, Greece, Malta and Cyprus to-
gether to sign an agreement and start
work on the technicalities of the search.
But no more pledges have been made, al-
though Bomberger says the researchers
need at least the same amount again.
When the four countries met for a sec-
ond time in the Hague on June 13 of this
year, the Italian govern-
ment refused to sign the
final declaration vow-
ing to enhance coopera-
tion for the search. Since
the country’s far-right
League party formed a
coalition government
in 2018, with its leader
Matteo Salvini in the
key post of Interior
Minister, Italy has im-
plemented some of Eu-
rope’s harshest policies
toward migrants and refugees. Salvini,
criticized as an “opportunist” by Prime
Minister Giuseppe Conti, who resigned
on Aug. 20, has closed Italy’s ports to mi-
grant rescue ships and has started bull-
dozing refugee settlements.
Bomberger remains confident that
Italy will eventually cooperate. “It’s early
days, so it’s not unusual that there are po-
litical issues at the beginning,” she says.
“I think we can overcome it.”
But for relatives of the dead like Mu-
rad’s, the political hostility and lack of
empathy shown by countries like Italy
feels like yet another indignity. “I want
you to put yourself in my place, not for
a day, just for one minute—just imagine
that you lost your family the same way I
lost my family,” Murad says.IngrId gudmundsson understands
what Murad is going through. Her daugh-
ter Linda was 30 years old, pregnant with^
Murad shows the only photograph
he has of his family. He now lives in
Theley, a village in Germany