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As the dust settled on the Libyan revolution, the posters for all the missing relatives
started to go up. Various figures for the number of missing people have been thrown
around from four hundred all the way up to fifty thousand plus.
“Our job quickly got bigger; we started receiving calls so we were informed via telephone
and from our personal contact here. If we knew there was a place that had bodies we
started to go to these places also.”
The role of committees such as the Libyan Society of the Missing is to count the missing,
the dead, the injured and the prisoners of war. A lot of the workers are volunteers,
even taking on the help of the local Scout troop to process the missing person documents.
Yet expertise in the form of forensic anthropologists, forensic pathologists, even archaeologists,
to do proper exhumations is still lacking to do the job properly.
With so many challenges in locating and identifying missing people, at this early stage, it doesn’t
look hopeful for the friends and relatives who are searching. The success rate is near
zero and there seems to be too many missing people organisations working independently
of any official authority.
“Set up a coherent national mechanism that will streamline all the different efforts
that are now taking place on the ground from various associations and organisations from
the civil society, to unite these efforts under on structure, with a centralised database
and under a commission that is independent, in order not to duplicate efforts, not to
have the families knock on the door of 5 different associations, so this needs to be concerted
and coordinated properly.”
However, Sabri’s story is different. Like a lot of people Sabri carried on the search
himself. Placing pictures of his brother in a mosque, some young men recognised the man
in the pictures from a video they had. His brother was arrested at an illegal checkpoint
by Qadhafi loyalists and never seen again. That is until their video showed four men
dead in a grave.
“At that time I wished that my brother wasn’t in that piece of video.”
“We thank god that we found our brother as a martyr. Because it’s a tragedy if you
don’t find your brother, or your friend, you will be in sorrow your whole life not
knowing. At least now we can go and pray at his grave.”
For thousands of others the search continues, dead or alive, all hoping to find solace in
locating their friends and family members.
This is the NATO Channel, reporting from Tripoli.