Red Cross to Identify Remains from Georgia’s Wars

On May 3, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) started the next round of excavations to search for and identify the human remains of persons, who went missing during and after the armed conflicts of 1990s and the August 2008 in Georgia, ICRC reported to Civil.ge on May 6. 

The first gravesites to be excavated by the ICRC forensic experts are located in Gori (two locations) and Kaspi Municipalities (one location) in eastern Georgia.

More than 30 gravesites are to be excavated by the ICRC between May and August in 2017. The gravesites are located in Shida Kartli, Imereti and Abkhazia regions of Georgia, as well as the area around the capital city of Tbilisi. Remains of about 150 missing persons are to be recovered.

Information about these sites was collected in the framework of two ICRC-established coordination mechanisms, one uniting participants from Tbilisi and Sokhumi, and another consisting of participants from Tbilisi, Tskhinvali and the Russian Federation. 

The coordination mechanisms were established in 2010 to provide answers for the families on the fate of their missing kins. 

Some 249 sets of human remains were recovered in 2010-2016. Of them, 107 were identified, handed over to their families and buried. The identification process of the remaining 142 sets of human remains is still ongoing.

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