Latest news with #InternationalCommissiononMissingPersons
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Science
- Boston Globe
Vietnam aches for its MIAs. Will America stop funding science to identify them?
The search for around 2,600 missing Americans from the Vietnam War has been a first-order issue for Washington and Hanoi ever since the conflict ended. But on that humid June afternoon in northern Vietnam, grave diggers with doctorates were gathering the bones of Vietnam's own missing warriors, whose ranks exceed 1 million, with an urgency and reverence befitting a task long overdue. The scientists were there to advance a recent breakthrough by putting it to use. A few months earlier, they and their partners — including the International Commission on Missing Persons, in The Hague — had figured out the chemistry and computing required to identify remains as badly degraded as those often found in Vietnam's acidic, tropical soil. For the first time, tiny snips of DNA taken from bones up to 70 years old could be used to link the country's fallen soldiers to distant relatives, unlocking lost truths and deeper healing. Families from Vietnam's north and south, their anguish still festering 50 years after the war ended, could find reconciliation in graves where their war dead lie together. Americans still unaccounted for might be found, too, as Vietnam's identification efforts expanded. Methods honed locally could also extend far beyond Vietnam, to help identify those lost to wildfires, typhoons, or other natural disasters worldwide. Advertisement 'Groundbreaking,' said Tim McMahon, director of DNA operations for the US Defense Department. That's how he described the new methods of accounting for the lost, adding: 'It's the next jump in identification.' Advertisement One thing that DNA analysis requires, however, is practice. Repetition at scale improves technique. But for Vietnam and the world, the opportunity that comes with the largest human identification project on the planet is now being threatened by the Trump administration's hostility toward foreign aid. The five-year grant from the United States that had sustained Vietnam's DNA project — paying for sequencing machines and collaborations with the U.S. military and the International Commission on Missing Persons — was suspended with the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development in January. The restored money that's left runs out in September. Before the disruptions, the scientists doing exhumations said they had aimed to identify 1,000 Vietnamese MIAs by July 11, the 30th anniversary of normalized US-Vietnam relations. That, they believed, would prove what former enemies could accomplish by pursuing closure through science. Now they are hoping for one. Thousands of miles from Washington, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vu Thi Ninh Thuy, 42, shared a common Vietnamese war story. A parade marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the conflict had just finished. As graying veterans strolled past the hotel where US generals once briefed reporters on daily body counts, she brought up her uncle, who vanished while fighting the Americans in 1974. Her eyes darting with emotion, she recounted how her childhood had been filled with exploratory trips south and north to look for him. Her family questioned his comrades. They visited local officials and eventually found a psychic who directed them, incorrectly, to a location not far from where she stood on that April morning. Advertisement 'We all feel restless until we can find their remains,' she said. 'Everyone who is Vietnamese wants to bring their loved ones closer to home.' Modern psychology teaches that 'ambiguous loss' — where death remains unverified and without resolution — freezes the grieving process, leading to chronic sorrow. In Vietnam, the pain is compounded by ancient beliefs. The country's common practice of ancestor worship, with offerings left at graves and shrines, dictates that if the dead aren't interred with other ancestors, the person's soul wanders homeless and hungry. Burying and honoring the dead is considered an obligation of the living. Vietnam's official efforts to account for those killed in the war have often been haphazard and hampered by bureaucracy. The remains of at least 300,000 fighters for North Vietnam have been found but not identified. In 2014, the Vietnamese government took a major step toward addressing those shortcomings, announcing that it would invest $25 million in a DNA identification project. A new lab opened on the outskirts of Hanoi in 2019. A year later, the International Commission on Missing Persons came on board. The project expanded with $7.4 million from USAID, awarded over five years, a fraction of what is spent annually to find and identify missing Americans. Experts such as Thomas Parsons have tried to fill gaps in the effort. Wiry and lean, with a frame easily lost in a lab coat, Parsons is a globally recognized authority on forensic genetics and the international commission's lead scientist in Vietnam. Advertisement In March, at the lab near Hanoi, he resembled a mountain climber with no mountain to climb. On a table, a NextSeq 1000, a 'high-throughput' sequencing system delivered in November at a cost of about $220,000, sat idle. It was one of many sophisticated machines covered in plastic after USAID's elimination. Parsons and his Vietnamese colleagues stressed that US foreign aid was not a handout, but rather a way to train Vietnam's researchers for an ambitious task using new genetic methods and technologies. 'We've already achieved a lot,' said Tran Trung Thanh, a molecular biologist and the lab's deputy director. 'We need more time to apply it in practice.' The main breakthrough occurred a few months before Donald Trump's inauguration, with 23 Vietnamese bone samples degraded by age and tropical conditions. Using chemical solutions and high-tech analysis, scientists from the international commission found that 70 percent of the samples generated DNA profiles capable of being matched to a parent or child. Several samples generated enough genetic material to connect with a single great-great-grandchild or even a first cousin's child or parent. Before last year, 9 of every 10 Vietnamese bone samples yielded nothing identifiable. Since President Clinton announced the restoration of diplomatic relations 30 years ago, Vietnam has handed over more than 1,000 sets of American remains. Ambassador Marc Knapper, the son of a Vietnam veteran, has lobbied behind the scenes for the United States to continue supporting Vietnam's MIA program. The International Commission on Missing Persons also wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio asking that funding be restored. In March, the project received a partial reprieve: US officials told scientists that they would receive the money allotted through the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Advertisement A State Department spokesperson said that maintaining 'the right mix of programs to support US national security and other core national interests of the United States requires an agile approach.' Instead of requesting another five-year grant, the International Commission on Missing Persons has requested $3 million from the United States to keep the project going for 12 to 18 months. 'If we don't receive funding beyond September,' Kathryne Bomberger, the commission's director general, said in an interview, 'the program will probably end.' This article originally appeared in
Miami Herald
3 days ago
- Science
- Miami Herald
Vietnam aches for its MIAs. Will America stop funding science to identify them?
The tombstones said 'unknown martyr.' The bones were decades old and covered in reddish mud, staining the white lab coats of a half-dozen visiting scientists. 'This tooth good?' asked a junior researcher, holding up a jawbone pulled from a grave. 'No, too decayed,' said his boss, an experienced geneticist. 'It has a copper dental crown.' The search for around 2,600 missing Americans from the Vietnam War has been a first-order issue for Washington and Hanoi ever since the conflict ended. But on that humid June afternoon in northern Vietnam, grave diggers with doctorates were gathering the bones of Vietnam's own missing warriors, whose ranks exceed 1 million, with an urgency and reverence befitting a task long overdue. The scientists were there to advance a recent breakthrough by putting it to use. A few months earlier, they and their partners -- including the International Commission on Missing Persons, in The Hague -- had figured out the chemistry and computing required to identify remains as badly degraded as those often found in Vietnam's acidic, tropical soil. For the first time, tiny snips of DNA taken from bones up to 70 years old could be used to link the country's fallen soldiers to distant relatives, unlocking lost truths and deeper healing. Families from Vietnam's north and south, their anguish still festering 50 years after the war ended, could find reconciliation in graves where their war dead lie together. Americans still unaccounted for might be found, too, as Vietnam's identification efforts expanded. Methods honed locally could also extend far beyond Vietnam, to help identify those lost to wildfires, typhoons or other natural disasters worldwide. 'Groundbreaking,' said Tim McMahon, director of DNA operations for the U.S. Defense Department. That's how he described the new methods of accounting for the lost, adding: 'It's the next jump in identification.' One thing that DNA analysis requires, however, is practice. Repetition at scale improves technique. But for Vietnam and the world, the opportunity that comes with the largest human identification project on the planet is now being threatened by the Trump administration's hostility toward foreign aid. The five-year grant from the United States that had sustained Vietnam's DNA project -- paying for sequencing machines and collaborations with the U.S. military and the International Commission on Missing Persons -- was suspended with the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development in January. The restored money that's left runs out in September. Before the disruptions, the scientists doing exhumations said they had aimed to identify 1,000 Vietnamese MIAs by July 11, the 30th anniversary of normalized U.S.-Vietnam relations. That, they believed, would prove what former enemies could accomplish by pursuing closure through science. Now they are hoping for one. What Vietnam Wants Thousands of miles from Washington, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vu Thi Ninh Thuy, 42, shared a common Vietnamese war story. A parade marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the conflict had just finished. As graying veterans strolled past the hotel where U.S. generals once briefed reporters on daily body counts, she brought up her uncle, who vanished while fighting the Americans in 1974. Her eyes darting with emotion, she recounted how her childhood had been filled with exploratory trips south and north to look for him. Her family questioned his comrades. They visited local officials and eventually found a psychic who directed them, incorrectly, to a location not far from where we stood on that April morning. 'We all feel restless until we can find their remains,' she said. 'Everyone who is Vietnamese wants to bring their loved ones closer to home.' Modern psychology teaches that 'ambiguous loss' -- where death remains unverified and without resolution -- freezes the grieving process, leading to chronic sorrow. In Vietnam, the pain is compounded by ancient beliefs. The country's common practice of ancestor worship, with offerings left at graves and shrines, dictates that if the dead aren't interred with other ancestors, the person's soul wanders homeless and hungry. Burying and honoring the dead is considered an obligation of the living. Vietnam's official efforts to account for those killed in the war have often been haphazard and hampered by bureaucracy. The remains of at least 300,000 fighters for North Vietnam have been found but not identified. In 2014, the Vietnamese government took a major step toward addressing those shortcomings, announcing that it would invest $25 million in a DNA identification project. A new lab opened on the outskirts of Hanoi in 2019. A year later, the International Commission on Missing Persons came on board. The project expanded with $7.4 million from USAID, awarded over five years, a fraction of what is spent annually to find and identify missing Americans. Experts like Thomas Parsons have tried to fill gaps in the effort. Wiry and lean, with a frame easily lost in a lab coat, Parsons is a globally recognized authority on forensic genetics and the international commission's lead scientist in Vietnam. When we met in March at the lab near Hanoi, he resembled a mountain climber with no mountain to climb. On a table, a NextSeq 1000, a 'high-throughput' sequencing system delivered in November at a cost of about $220,000, sat idle. It was one of many sophisticated machines covered in plastic after USAID's elimination. Parsons and his Vietnamese colleagues stressed that U.S. foreign aid was not a handout, but rather a way to train Vietnam's researchers for an ambitious task using new genetic methods and technologies. 'We've already achieved a lot,' said Tran Trung Thanh, a molecular biologist and the lab's deputy director. 'We need more time to apply it in practice.' The main breakthrough occurred a few months before President Donald Trump's inauguration with 23 Vietnamese bone samples degraded by age and tropical conditions. Using chemical solutions and high-tech analysis, scientists from the international commission found that 70% of the samples generated DNA profiles capable of being matched to a parent or child. Several samples generated enough genetic material to connect with a single great-great-grandchild or even a first cousin's child or parent. Before last year, 9 of every 10 Vietnamese bone samples yielded nothing identifiable. 'The breakthrough is the successful implementation in Vietnam of these tools that are emerging from the cutting edge of forensic science, in a context where other methods fail,' Parsons said. Another scientist compared their work to searching for crumbs of a corn flake in a mountain of sand. Duty and Doubts Bob Connor, 78, a chatty Air Force veteran who lives near Philadelphia, signed up to fight Communists as a young man. More recently, he helped find a mass grave for their dead that he had heard about during a tour outside Saigon in 1968. Since 2016, Connor says, he has located around 8,000 unidentified Vietnamese. The official tally of Americans who went missing during the Vietnam War is 2,646. 'The families are the key to the whole thing, from a standpoint that it's no different from our MIAs,' he said. 'Should we walk away from it -- hell no,' he added. 'We owe it to them.' Since President Bill Clinton announced the restoration of diplomatic relations 30 years ago, Vietnam has handed over more than 1,000 sets of American remains. Ambassador Marc Knapper, the son of a Vietnam veteran, has lobbied behind the scenes for the United States to continue supporting Vietnam's MIA program. The International Commission on Missing Persons also wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio asking that funding be restored. In March, the project received a partial reprieve. U.S. officials told scientists that they would receive the money allotted through the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. A State Department spokesperson said that maintaining 'the right mix of programs to support U.S. national security and other core national interests of the United States requires an agile approach.' Even without such uncertainty, the U.S.-Vietnam relationship has already been battered. Vietnam and the United States on Wednesday reached a preliminary agreement that will add tariffs of 20% to 40% on imports from Vietnam -- a major blow for its economy that follows sharp cuts in foreign aid for health, education and the environment. Trump's approach 'has shaken Vietnamese confidence in the United States,' said Tim Rieser, a former adviser to then-Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., a key figure in U.S.-Vietnam reconciliation. 'They have told us the Chinese are already stepping into the vacuum.' Reduced ambitions for partnership with the United States are increasingly the norm. Instead of requesting another five-year grant, the International Commission on Missing Persons has requested $3 million from the United States to keep the project going for 12 to 18 months. 'If we don't receive funding beyond September,' Kathryne Bomberger, the commission's director general, said in an interview, 'the program will probably end.' If that happens, American remains commingled with those of Vietnamese soldiers may never be found, and growth in humanitarian identification will be stunted. Families on the cusp of clarity will remain in limbo for longer, and possibly forever. At the cemetery in the country's north, the scientists soldiered on, maintaining faith in their grisly labor. They had just a few weeks to make an identification, maybe for remains from the 'American War,' maybe from a war against China in 1979. On their final day, a family appeared, laying out fruit and dove-white flowers and lighting incense at the grave of a soldier lucky enough to have been buried with a name. Thanh, the project's deputy director, watched quietly as the scratch of shovels on dirt mingled with birdsong. 'We just want to bring certainty,' Thanh said. 'To give people information they've never had.' This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Copyright 2025
New York Times
3 days ago
- Science
- New York Times
Vietnam Aches for Its M.I.A.'s. Will America Stop Funding Science to Identify Them?
The tombstones said 'unknown martyr.' The bones were decades old and covered in reddish mud, staining the white lab coats of a half-dozen visiting scientists. 'This tooth good?' asked a junior researcher, holding up a jawbone pulled from a grave. 'No, too decayed,' said his boss, an experienced geneticist. 'It has a copper dental crown.' The search for around 2,600 missing Americans from the Vietnam War has been a first-order issue for Washington and Hanoi ever since the conflict ended. But on that humid June afternoon in northern Vietnam, grave diggers with Ph.D.'s were gathering the bones of Vietnam's own missing warriors, whose ranks exceed one million, with an urgency and reverence befitting a task long overdue. The scientists were there to advance a recent breakthrough by putting it to use. A few months earlier, they and their partners — including the International Commission on Missing Persons, in The Hague — had figured out the chemistry and computing required to identify remains as badly degraded as those often found in Vietnam's acidic, tropical soil. For the first time, tiny snips of DNA taken from bones up to 70 years old could be used to link the country's fallen soldiers to distant relatives, unlocking lost truths and deeper healing. Families from Vietnam's north and south, their anguish still festering 50 years after the war ended, could find reconciliation in graves where their war dead lie together. Americans still unaccounted for might be found, too, as Vietnam's identification efforts expanded. Methods honed locally could also extend far beyond Vietnam, to help identify those lost to wildfires, typhoons or other natural disasters worldwide. 'Groundbreaking,' said Tim McMahon, director of DNA operations for the U.S. Defense Department. That's how he described the new methods of accounting for the lost, adding: 'It's the next jump in identification.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
28-01-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘I watched every video to see my father's face': the woman who became the voice of Syria's missing on why she isn't giving up hope
When insurgents threw open the doors of Aleppo central prison in northern Syria as they overran the city in December, Wafa Mustafa, 34, watched videos of the scenes from exile in Germany in disbelief. Shocked detainees could be seen running into the night as a decades-long dictatorship built on a network of prisons and torture chambers crumbled. Mustafa began praying that the insurgents would reach the detention centres in Damascus, where she believed her father, Ali, was being held by the feared intelligence services. He was kidnapped from their home in the Syrian capital more than a decade ago and she has not seen or heard from him since. In the intervening years, Mustafa became the public face of tens of thousands of families suffering under the constant weight of enforced disappearances in Syria; she is a relentless campaigner intent on making sure the missing are not forgotten. 'I have done everything I could these past years,' she says. 'I exhausted myself. I cried, I got angry, I talked to politicians, I protested, and then … someone just opened the door and everyone is free. 'All that stood between me and my father's prison was just a door that could easily open.' Almost two months on from the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime, the filthy cells of Syria's notorious detention centres lie empty for the first time. But the opening of the country's prisons has brought solace only to some: the International Commission on Missing Persons estimates that between 100,000 and 200,000 people are missing. Mustafa has returned to Syria and joined thousands of others in searching for traces of loved ones. Posters bearing the faces of the missing line city squares, the corners of Damascus's winding alleyways and even the ancient walls of the Umayyad mosque compound. Her own frantic search, ranging from security branches to hospital morgues, has so far yielded only one clue: three documents discussing Ali Mustafa and the friend he was detained with in 2013 were found in the notorious military intelligence detention centre known as branch 215 in Damascus. The information about her father went all the way back to 1995. Mustafa says the new regime has provided little support and demonstrated little planning for families trying to find out what happened to loved ones kidnapped, tortured and imprisoned by the Assad regime. She says there are rooms full of files still held in the labyrinth of detention centres in Damascas. 'Now, it is said that these places are protected and the new authorities don't allow people to just go inside. They say they will organise these sites, but I still don't know how, and they've said nothing specific about how they will do this,' she says. Mustafa has met the chief prosecutor and others from Syria's caretaker authority, but found herself quickly disappointed by their lack of planning to tackle the issue of missing people. 'Despite the fact they said this is the most important file, frankly I don't really see any progress, and they're not speaking to people yet,' she says. 'They said they will work on it, but there's no progress that we know of until now.' The de facto head of the government, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has met a stream of visitors including Debra Tice, the mother of the US journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared in Syria in 2012, but Mustafa bristles at his perceived reluctance to meet the families of the missing. 'In the past month I have been trying so hard to arrange a meeting between al-Sharaa and the families of the disappeared. I was promised many times it would happen but it hasn't until today,' she says. Mustafa emphasises her solidarity with Tice's plight and hopes he is returned to his loved ones alive, but says she balked at Sharaa's choice to focus on the case of a white American detainee rather than the hundreds of thousands of Syrian families with urgent questions about their missing loved ones. Sign up to Global Dispatch Get a different world view with a roundup of the best news, features and pictures, curated by our global development team after newsletter promotion While she understands meeting Tice is a political decision, Mustafa says it is still a choice to prioritise a non-Syrian detainee over tens of thousands of Syrian ones. 'Unfortunately there is zero clarity from the new government regarding what the families of the disappeared should do to find the truth about their loved ones, to find information or to contact the new government. Al-Sharaa has not spoken directly to the families of the disappeared, which means no work that we know of until today on this huge issue,' she says. Mustafa says she has already spent weeks picking through a firehose of information that spread across social media: pictures of identity cards and rooms overflowing with filing cabinets and documents, and video of tortured detainees writhing on hospital beds. 'I had to pause every video and repeat it over and over, to see if I can identify my father's face somewhere,' she says. Then there were the images from Sednaya prison, an infamous facility once estimated to hold up to 20,000 people where Amnesty International reported that thousands were secretly extrajudicially hanged, showing people rummaging through papers spread across the floor. Mustafa was furious, angry on behalf of thousands of Syrians in exile who she feared could be watching people destroy vital evidence about their loved ones. 'I was scared that one of these documents that has been damaged or destroyed might have the only truth about father, and now I will never know. It's very sad,' she says. The International Committee of the Red Cross in Damascus is trying to trace an estimated 35,000 missing people, while a United Nations body set up two years ago to find out the fate of Syria's missing – but is yet to launch its search – has called on the new Syrian authorities to protect all possible sources of evidence, such as records and mass graves. But with international organisations caught off-guard by the downfall of the Assad regime and the rush to examine evidence of its crimes, Mustafa says she and other families of the missing feel abandoned. 'Of course Assad is the main perpetrator, but everyone who let us down, allowed this chaos to happen, everyone who had the resources and the mandate and did not use it in the earliest days after his fall, is responsible,' she says. 'I am terrified that I will not have any information ever.'
