«A Country of Missing People»: The Book of Numbers and Fates

Andriy Kulykov: Hello and welcome to Ukraine Calling, the English-language podcast from Hromadske Radio in Kyiv. I am Andriy Kulykov and today’s interlocutor is Kevin Sullivan. He works for the International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague and is the author of the newly published book about Ukraine, «A Country of Missing People». Let’s start with the title of the book. When you read «A Country of Missing People», you get a rather macabre impression. Do you really think that the scale of the problem in Ukraine is so dangerous?

Kevin Sullivan: The title is a quotation. One of the people who was describing the situation in the south of the country told a reporter that when the territory is returned to Ukraine, it will be found to be a country of missing people. This followed documentary evidence of abductions, kidnapping and unlawful arrests of citizens. In terms of the scale of the missing persons issue in Ukraine, the evidence suggests that this will be a very significant and challenging legacy of the conflict.

However, I would add to this the fact that there now exist ways of addressing such a major problem. We can look around the world, and we see countries like Vietnam, which are still struggling with a legacy of possibly millions of missing persons. Iraq too has between 250,000 and 1 million missing persons, and even countries that are not at war, like Colombia and Mexico, have tens of thousands of missing persons cases. There are other countries that are addressing the issue on this scale. It’s important to emphasize that the scale in Ukraine is very large and very serious. It’s equally important to emphasize that there are things that can be done to address this problem.

Variety of Strategies

Andriy Kulykov: As the author of the book and also as a person who has worked for the International Commission for Missing Persons for quite a while, what are the means of solving the problem that you would single out in the first term?

Kevin Sullivan: There are a variety of strategies that can be adopted. ICMP was the first organisation in the world to develop a DNA-led approach to accounting for missing persons. What that involves is inviting any members of a family that has a missing person to provide a blood sample from which DNA can be extracted. All of us have a unique DNA profile, just like a fingerprint. Those profiles can be put in a database and profiles taken from unidentified bodies can be compared so that you can get a match. Once you have a match, you can do additional tests, but you can be 99.5 percent certain, even higher usually.

Andriy Kulykov: The actual figure that you quote in your book is 99.95 percent.

Kevin Sullivan: That’s right. That’s the threshold. Usually, the certainty is higher than that. You’re able to identify bodies. I should also say that this applies to people who are still alive but are not able to identify themselves.

For example, children. You would be able to identify children as being members of a particular family using a DNA-led process.

In order to make that process work, you have to take tens of thousands of samples from family members. In the case of former Yugoslavia, ICMP took more than 100,000 samples in order to identify around 20,000 people. The exercise is a very serious undertaking. What ICMP has found around the world is that this is an investment in stability. It’s an investment in recovery. Because if you don’t do this, you have hundreds of thousands of family members who will never be able to resolve the issue of the conflict, even after the conflict finishes.

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Yugoslav Experience

Andriy Kulykov: You were a foreign correspondent in Sarajevo during the wars in former Yugoslavia. You have the first-hand experience of being in an environment which was very volatile and which by now seems to be rather settled compared to what it has been. What are the similarities and what are the major differences between the situation in former Yugoslavia and Ukraine concerning the missing persons issue?

Kevin Sullivan: I think it’s important to say that while there are similarities, there are also very significant differences. It’s equally important to stress that one solution in one country doesn’t necessarily apply in another country. In fact, in the book, I make the point that being familiar with the situation in former Yugoslavia doesn’t necessarily mean that you have insights on the situation in Ukraine.

Having said that, there are similarities. One of the things that I found in Bosnia and Herzegovina was that at the beginning of the conflict, there was a great deal of determination to not fall into the trap of adopting an attitude to the other side that was absolutely and irrevocably negative. After three years of conflict, I have to say that attitude had come under a great deal of pressure and it was very difficult for people to maintain some kind of openness or objectiveness. What we found in former Yugoslavia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular was that initially the issue of missing persons wasn’t a major political priority. It only became a major political priority when the families of the missing got together and began to lobby the authorities.

They became angry, indignant, active, dynamic, and they began to understand that if they didn’t make their case, they would be forgotten, and if they did make their case, the authorities would be obliged to respond. So that’s an arc on which Ukraine may just be at the beginning. It has taken a long time in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but those families made their voices heard. And I’d say, a third comparison that might be useful is that the war comes to the people. The people don’t choose the conflict that’s been imposed upon them, and everybody will react to that in a different way.

I have not spent enough time in Ukraine to make this observation, but I can certainly make it about Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, which I also spent time in during the war. And that is, it very often brings out the worst in people, but it does bring out the best in people in as much as some people will show enormous grace under pressure. They will behave in a way that, in my view, justifies your faith in human nature. And I believe, in my acquaintance with the situation in Ukraine today, there has been a great deal of, we would say, phlegmatic response to very unusual circumstances so that people have been calm. And the important thing is to keep calm and carry on, of course, famously. And I get the sense that that is happening in Ukraine today.

Competing Narratives

Andriy Kulykov: Kevin Sullivan, the author of the book «A Country of Missing People» and a member of the ICMP team, is our interlocutor in this Ukraine Calling podcast. And as we are talking about former Yugoslavia and the problems that were overcome there in the missing persons issue, which problems are still outstanding there and what we can expect in Ukraine? Although I admit, and I accept your point of view, that comparisons may be irrelevant in this respect, but the knowledge of the experience is important.

Kevin Sullivan: There are two things I would draw your attention to, Andriy. One is that there were 40,000 missing people 30 years ago. Today there are around 10,500 missing. The pressure to account for those 10,500 has to be maintained because as you account for missing persons, statistically, the constituency that lobbies to carry on working becomes smaller. So it’s important and it’s increasingly difficult to maintain the pressure on the authorities to continue looking. There is a view that after 30 years, what are you going to find? Is it possible? And a message that I think is very important is that you can identify people 100 years after the event. There was a soldier from the battle of Waterloo, a British soldier who was identified three or four years ago. This is two centuries after he was killed at Waterloo. So it is possible to continue locating and identifying missing persons many decades after the event. That’s something I think that should be stressed.

I think another aspect of the issue is that ICMP has been at the forefront of establishing an accurate and incontestable historical record of events.

Immediately after the genocide at Srebrenica in July 1995, the perpetrators moved the victims’ bodies not once but twice, in some cases, three times. The object of that was to hide the extent of the crime. For years there was an argument about how many people had actually been killed. By identifying by name with 99,95% certainty, each of these victims, ICMP was able to show that 8,000 people had been massacred. This was an incontestable fact and it is part of the narrative of what took place. This prevents the politicization of history.

In Ukraine today, there are two competing narratives. Those narratives will be served well or badly by the scientific evidence that can be presented to support them. That is why one of the things which we found in former Yugoslavia, which is certainly the case in Ukraine today, is that you must have evidence management that will stand up in court. That’s why it’s so important when you find a mass grave that that grave is excavated in a very methodical manner and that sometimes takes time, and it’s very understandable that people are impatient, but you need to do it properly so that perhaps years from now the evidence from that grave can be presented in court.

Andriy Kulykov: The subtitle of your book is about truth and justice for the families of missing people. Whereas it seems that the issue of the truth is self-explanatory, what do we mean by justice? Is it criminal prosecution? Is it just knowing and naming and all this kind of stuff?

Kevin Sullivan: On the point of truth, it is self-evident, and yet an additional burden that families of the missing have to bear in different scenarios around the world is when the political opposition simply addresses them and says your relative went away, you’re blaming us for something that didn’t happen. So in that sense, truth does actually become very important. In terms of justice, there are again two issues. One is, it’s not sufficient simply to say we are sorry, it is necessary to find out everything that can possibly be found out about the circumstances in which a person went missing. This is part of the capacity of the victim’s family to come to terms with what has happened. It is also necessary for the state to recognize its obligations to those families and in many cases, for example, in Iraq, families have had to work very hard in order to have the support from the government to which they are entitled. And in this respect it’s important to say that an effective policy will not make any distinction about the person who is missing, which side they were on, what their political affiliation was, what their ethnicity or their religious association might have been. Because again, there are countries where the family of one missing person will receive very generous support from the state and the family of another missing person will receive practically nothing because they come from different communities. And first of all, that’s not an effective way to run things, nor is it an ethical way to run things. But also the experience of having a missing person at a human level is the same, no matter what community you come from.

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Children’s Predicament

Andriy Kulykov: One of the distinguishing features of the current situation in Ukraine, as it seems, is the issue of abducting and deporting children. Although in your book you mention the instances in Argentina, as far as I remember, when this practice was there but anyway, this was inside the country, now we get information that our children are being taken to Russia. How dangerous this situation is, and what are the chances that kids are found and returned, to your mind?

Kevin Sullivan: There are several issues to consider here. The first is that, for example, in Guatemala, illegal adoptions were in many cases in order to take children from Guatemala to the United States, whether or not their adopted parents knew the circumstances under which they had been taken away from their natural parents. So this cross-border adoption is not unique, but in the case that we’re looking at today in terms of Ukraine and Russia, there is a systematic and a very large-scale operation that has been underway. You have, again, the issue of identifying children who are not able to identify themselves. This can be done and this was done after decades in the case of Argentina that you mentioned where the grandmothers’ of the disappeared created something called a paternity index, and they nicknamed it the «grand paternity index», and they were able to show that people who were now in their thirties were the natural children of the people in Argentina. If the issue goes for decades rather than years, you then have a situation where reconciliation with the natural parents becomes very difficult at human level. But if this can be addressed sooner than that, then it will be possible to rectify to some extent what has happened, and what we have seen is that again, there was evidence of this, which is in the book, which is anecdotal and by no means empirical, but it seems that there remains a certain legal leverage in individual cases. It’s very difficult, and not all parents have the resources to follow this where children have been repatriated and returned to their families, but this is a minority of cases.

Andriy Kulykov: While writing the book, you have researched material both from foreign and Ukrainian sources. How sure you are that this material was verified?

Kevin Sullivan: I have, as much as possible, endeavoured to ensure that everything has been verified. I have relied to a great extent on testimony and reporting from other journalists. Where it has been in doubt I have either not used the material or I have indicated that this is on the basis of a second-hand report. And what I have tried to do is offer an overarching picture which, and I believe I can be confident, will offer an accurate general view of what has happened and what is happening and that overall picture will then allow us, in the coming years, to go into individual areas in greater detail. But I would describe the book as a survey and I would describe it as a tool that can serve other people who are coming into this area.

Target Audience

Andriy Kulykov: You have actually preempted my next question, but still, I will pose it. What is the target audience of your book in English and in Ukrainian because it’s been translated?

Kevin Sullivan: Well, it’s very important, as we’ve discussed already, that we do not, and the International Commission on Missing Persons or any other organization that seeks to help Ukraine, it’s very important that they do not come into the country and say, «Here are the answers, this is how it should be done» And we have tried very hard not to do that. What we have done is to say, «This is what has happened in other countries and this is how they addressed them. This is how we have developed a program to address this issue which may be of use in Ukraine». So the book has been targeted at policy makers. It’s also been targeted at other international organisations because one of the recommendations is that there might be a plenary meeting of all the organisations that are trying to help in this area so that they don’t overlap and actually serve as an impediment to one another and to the Ukrainian partners that they’re trying to help. We’ve had cases of equipment being donated in one place but not really connected to a system that would make it useful in another place, and so it’s also directed at organisations, at principally international organisations. However I would say I hope that it will be of some use to Ukrainian civil society organisations that are involved in this issue including families of the missing. And I should say, Andriy, that yesterday I attended a press conference organised by three civil society organisations, and they had two or three guests as well, and after the press conference we went to a march from Maidan, all families of the missing, and there were several hundred people in the march and at the conclusion of it there were speeches and I heard there the messages that one hears in similar context elsewhere in the world. The families were asking the authorities to listen to them, to listen to the things that they need and the things that they can do to be of assistance. This is a process where if the different stakeholders come together, they can be effective. It’s not a confrontational process, it’s a cooperative and collaborative process, and the book describes how that can be done. So I hope that it will also be of use to families of the missing and associations of families of the missing.

Andriy Kulykov: The book is not short, it  is not easy to read because it tells a lot about people’s grief and people’s predicament. How hard it was to write it, emotionally?

Kevin Sullivan: I worked as a journalist for many years, and worked in situations where very often the object was to report other peoples’ misfortune. And I think as a journalist, it’s important to remember that the issue is other people, it’s not the reaction of the journalist, the journalist is not the story. And I think in this case, while the subject matter is at a human level, extremely difficult, the object is to be of some small service and in that respect there is a feeling that you might be able to do something positive. So that means that it’s not a depressing exercise, it’s not a futile exercise. It actually, I hope, is an exercise that can have positive results.

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Aspects of Literature

Andriy Kulykov: A couple of other personal questions. You’ve been a successful journalist, you are the author of a successful novel, The Longest Winter. What made you go into being an expert at the ICMP? And does it mean that you have abandoned your literary or journalistic efforts apart from writing «A Country of Missing People»?

Kevin Sullivan: My novel The Longest Winter is set over two or three days at the end of 1992 in Sarajevo, which at that time was under siege. And I’ve also written a novel that’s set during the Greek civil war and another two novels that are set in late 19th century Scotland. And the two novels that are set in late 19th century Scotland feature a photographer who’s from another country, and he views the United Kingdom as an outsider, which I think is the perspective of a foreign correspondent, even though I myself come from Scotland. So I think writing novels is related to some extent to being a journalist. There is a certain connection, although I always felt that it might be possible to say more in a novel about conflict and about the challenges, particularly the challenges that ordinary people face, than it is in day-to-day reporting, at the end of which you sometimes feel you’ve only had a drop in the ocean in terms of communicating the experiences that you see. Something that has always interested me has been the fate and experience of ordinary civilians in conflict and that’s something that, I believe, might lead naturally into working with an organisation like the International Commission on Missing Persons, which is very much focused on helping people to recover from conflict, and that is a process that may take ten or twenty or thirty years and it’s something that I think also I would want to explore in fiction again in the future.

Going Native?

Andriy Kulykov: Now about the status and the work or the job of a foreign correspondent. You were a foreign correspondent, but you experienced yourself some of the things that happen to local people and you spent some time in Sarajevo during the siege of Sarajevo. Have you gone native?

Kevin Sullivan: [Laughs.] I think it’s important to go native, and I think you don’t ever have the privilege of going completely native, and I should say in that respect, when I was wounded in Bosnia at the beginning of 1993, I was evacuated and I was taken by British soldiers from a place where there were other Bosnian wounded, and lifted up and taken away and put in a plane and sent to the UK for treatment. I returned to Sarajevo for my recovery but when I was being taken away I had to confront the fact that my experience was really, relatively speaking, much less painful than the experience of the people who were around me. So I wish that I could say that I have gone fully native, I would aspire to do that but one must recognize privilege and there was certainly a certain amount of that. When I returned to Sarajevo in April 1993, I spent two months in an apartment where I was learning to walk again and because I was relatively immobile, I was able to sit with people who were complaining about the weather or talking about how difficult it was to get food, and they were always so humorous and also they were looking after me, so I was the subject of their thoughtfulness rather than the other way around, and I think it’s important to become vulnerable, and I found that experience to be inspiring.

Andriy Kulykov: Now back to the book for a while, although we have never strayed away from it, in a sense. As I said, the book is comprehensive, has seven chapters, introduction, conclusion, but it’s impossible to cram everything into the book, however long it is. What you had to leave out, and do you probably plan to revise the book, and make the second edition and so on?

Kevin Sullivan: The book is based on research which I did in Ukraine at the end of September and the beginning of October last year. I was in Chernivtsi and in Kyiv of course, and then in Kharkiv and Izyum. But that period was very very short and very very intensive and in my view, I subsequently, in writing the book, regretted that I wasn’t able to write it while being in Ukraine because I would have spoken to many more people including many more families of the missing and I felt that had circumstances allowed, I would have preferred to have written the book in Ukraine and certainly I hope that it will be sufficiently useful that we will, in the future, update the material. One of the things that I think is inevitable is that research conducted even at the beginning of 2023 by now is already beginning to be out of date, so it’s very difficult to keep the numbers, for example, up to date and that’s something that we could certainly look at doing in the future.

Andriy Kulykov: Thank you very much. You’ve listened to Ukraine Calling, a podcast from Hromadske Radio in Kyiv, and our interviewee this time was Kevin Sullivan. He works for the International Commission for Missing Persons with headquarters in The Hague, and he is the author of the book «A Country of Missing People».