The memorial wall in the small river town stands next to the bus station, a long slab of gray stone covered in photographs, flowers and candles in red glass jars. On a cold morning this week, Marta, a retired schoolteacher in her sixties, straightened a picture of her son and lit a new candle. He was 24 when he was killed, nineteen months ago, in the war her country has been fighting along its southern border for almost three years.
“For a long time I said nothing,” she told News. “Now I want to know how he died, and why.”
Marta is one of more than 400 parents and spouses who signed an open letter delivered to the neighboring country’s defense ministry on Monday. The letter, seen in full by News., asks for three things: an honest count of the dead, the return of every body still listed as missing, and a public explanation of how the war is meant to end. Like others interviewed for this report, Marta asked that only her first name be used.
From private grief to a public letter
For most of the war, families mourned quietly. Funerals were small, local papers carried brief notices, and open criticism was rare. That began to change last spring, said the letter’s organizer, a nurse named Vera, whose husband died in the first months of the fighting.
At first we only shared phone numbers, to help each other with paperwork. Then we realized we were all asking the same questions and nobody was answering.
Vera, organizer of the families’ letter
The group now has members in more than thirty towns. Its messages are less about politics than about information: families describe waiting months for official confirmation of a death, receiving conflicting accounts of what happened, and in some cases still having nothing to bury.
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