ICRC expands Internet-based tracing service in Kosovo

The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross said Monday it was expanding the use of the Internet in its attempt to help Kosovar refugees reestablish family contacts and trace missing people.

The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross said Monday it was expanding the use of the Internet in its attempt to help Kosovar refugees reestablish family contacts and trace missing people.

Jurg Frei, head of the ICRC’s Balkans tracing service, said the Internet was becoming a key tool in trying to help the tens of thousands of refugees and displaced people find their family members.

“In Kosovo, we already have three reception centres which regularly use the ICRC’s special Internet website to establish e-mail contacts between family members,” Frei said, referring to the centres in Pristina, Prizren and Pec.

He said the number of centres should be doubled within the next three weeks, despite some technical difficulties in the war-ravaged province.

The ICRC’s website — www.familylinks.ICRC.org – allows refugees to send electronic mail to their relatives registered in ICRC reception centres within Kosovo or neighbouring Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro.

Ethnic Albanians can also use the website to publish their names and present address so that their relatives can get in touch with them.

“This is a long-term project which will eventually also allow individual people in Kosovo to use the ICRC computers themselves to establish contact with their lost family members,” Frei said.

The ICRC said that, apart from the Internet, it was also using traditional paper application forms to trace a relative, and was increasingly providing mobile telephone stations throughout Kosovo.

A Swiss Red Cross spokeswoman in Berne said Monday that the use of the Internet as a tracing tool appeared to have subsided within Switzerland.

She said that, in April, hundreds of ethnic Albanians had contacted her office to find out more about their friends and relatives in Kosovo. But now, there were only about five inquiries a day.

The spokeswoman said that many of the tens of thousands of Kosovar refugees within Switzerland were apparently trying to establish direct contact with their relatives by using mobile telephones.


From SRI staff.