On July 27, Ms. Vu Ngoc Thuy - Deputy Director of the Department of People with Meritorious Services (Ministry of Home Affairs) - said: After nearly 4 months of implementation, the 500 Days and Nights Campaign has completed the preparation work on promulgating policies, mechanisms, plans and determining goals and methods of implementation.
By July 25, the campaign achieved positive results such as: Finding 1,488 martyrs' graves and 7 collective martyrs' graves; taking samples of nearly 80,000 martyrs' graves, of which more than 55,000 graves are eligible for sampling; taking more than 93,000 samples of relatives of martyrs...
The entire 500-day and night Campaign will have to complete specific goals including: Searching and repatriating about 7,000 martyrs' remains; taking samples for 100% of martyrs' graves that have not been identified. In particular, the Campaign aims to appraise about 18,000 DNA samples of martyrs' remains, and in the last 6 months of 2026, strive to complete about 9,000 samples.
These are large-scale tasks, requiring very high progress. Besides having many forces participating in the Campaign for the first time needing to be trained, we also face a shortage of technical personnel, challenges in DNA testing for remains that have been buried for many decades" - Deputy Director of the Department of People with Meritorious Services informed.
To accelerate the Campaign, the National Steering Committee for Searching, Repatriating and Identifying Martyrs' Remains (Steering Committee 515) has synchronously directed many solutions to improve DNA testing capacity.
First of all, it is to maximize the capacity of existing assessment facilities, and at the same time invest in equipment, improve technical processes and apply modern science and technology to improve the success rate of assessment, especially for severely decomposed remains.
Continue to research and expand international cooperation in accordance with practical conditions to access new technologies, contributing to shortening the time to identify martyrs' remains and ensuring the accuracy of the appraisal results.
The forces also accelerated the progress of collecting DNA samples from relatives of martyrs, completing the database and strengthening coordination between ministries, sectors, and localities so that the entire process could be implemented synchronously and effectively.
The Department of People with Meritorious Services is coordinating with functional agencies to accelerate the completion and commissioning of a database on martyrs, martyrs' graves and martyrs' cemeteries; a database on martyrs' DNA and relatives of martyrs. At the same time, the unit will digitize dossiers of people with meritorious services to synchronize them into the database.
The Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Public Security and localities are also completing and updating the relevant database to identify the remains of martyrs who lack information.
We hope that after the 500 Days and Nights Campaign, a large data warehouse will be formed to better perform the work of identifying martyrs' remains. We also hope that martyrs' families can continue to provide information about the fighting process, sacrifice, initial burial place of martyrs and participate in collecting DNA samples according to the instructions of functional agencies to speed up the process of identifying martyrs' remains" - Ms. Thuy informed.
