Florence Anselmo: leading the Red Cross search for the missing

GENEVA: Tracing and reuniting family members separated by war, migration and disasters is as "bitter-sweet" now for Florence Anselmo, head of the Red Cross's missing persons agency, as the day she started.At 51, she still gets overcome with emotion during family reunions."Even on video, it moves me. Fortunately, most of my years in the field were before I became a mother," she told AFP in an interview."Sometimes I doubt I'd be able to do it again without breaking down in tears."After nine years as head of the Central Tracing Agency (CTA) of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Anselmo is preparing to leave her post in June.The Swiss and Italian national fondly recalls the first reunion she took part in as an ICRC official, in Colombia, aged 26.She walked the last few kilometres (miles) alone through the jungle to recover a hostage from an armed group, before bringing him back to his family, who greeted him in a "completely extraordinary moment of jubilation".Since then, the number of people asking the Red Cross to help find their loved ones has grown "exponentially", Anselmo said, driven by conflicts, ever-longer and more dangerous migration routes and climate change.

More than 56,000 new cases were registered last year -- up from 13,000 in 2014.Anselmo is particularly moved by "the persistence and astounding courage" of women who risk danger to find their sons or husbands, sometimes venturing across front lines or braving gang violence in countries such as Mexico."They are often the first to make contact with the families of the opposing side and build bridges between communities that demonise each other," said Anselmo, who also spent 10 years working for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) before returning to the ICRC.

Hope and despair

In the search for missing people, "there are moments of extreme joy", she said -- sometimes even in simple acts like giving good news to loved ones over the phone or in a letter."Unfortunately, it's also very often bad news," she stressed.Reunions can also be upsetting.Anselmo recalled bringing back to his family a Burundian child soldier found in the Democratic Republic of Congo. "You could see in his eyes... that he had experienced things that had robbed him of his childhood," she said."It was a little bitter-sweet because there was the parents' joy but we realised that returning to normal life was going to be complicated."By 2024, the ICRC was trying to trace approximately 255,000 missing persons.This is only "the tip of the iceberg", as people often turn to the Red Cross only as a last resort, Anselmo said.For the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria alone, 116,000 and 35,000 cases respectively have been registered with the CTA.In all crises around the world people want, above all else, to be reunited with their loved ones.Family members are often left in a state of "ambiguous loss" that makes them "oscillate between hope and despair, and unable to move on", she explained.And in the current era of "financial contraction", the agency must sometimes restrict its criteria for accepting new cases - something which troubles Anselmo.After growing up in the Swiss countryside and studying political science in Lausanne, she began her career in humanitarian work with a Swiss organisation helping asylum seekers, before joining the Geneva-based ICRC.

Mammoth task in Syria

The CTA's predecessor, the Basel agency, began its work during the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War.More than a century and a half on, artificial intelligence is now helping triangulate data to find missing persons.But the digital world brings its own dangers. In 2022, cyber-attackers seized the confidential data of more than 500,000 vulnerable people from the ICRC's servers, information relating to the movement's family links services.Anselmo hopes the tracing agency will be able to bring its experience to bear in Syria.The fate of tens of thousands of detainees and others who went missing remains one of the most harrowing legacies of Syria's long years of civil war, which erupted in 2011."It's quite dizzying. We hear about mass graves but also individual graves that are still being discovered every day," she said.Estimates put the number of missing persons in Syria at between 100,000 and 200,000.Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad was overthrown in December 2024.Anselmo welcomed the new Syrian authorities' creation last month of a national commission for missing persons.But she explained that "even a government with the most sophisticated forensic system could not tackle such a mammoth task alone".