A decade after war, almost 2 000 people are still listed as missing in Kosovo, haunting their families and stalling efforts to reconcile ethnic Albanians and Serbs.
”It is an open and fresh wound which is still bleeding,” prominent Kosovo human rights activist Pajazit Nushi said ahead of the International Day of the Disappeared on Sunday.
”The missing are not the only victims. The burden also weighs on their relatives, parents and children, previous and next family generations, their friends and communities.”
Kosovo’s 1998 to 1999 war between security forces loyal to the then-Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and separatist ethnic Albanian rebels claimed about 10 000 lives.
It also left at least 4 000 people missing, with the fate of 1 889 of them, mostly ethnic Albanians, still unknown to their families, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Ethnic Albanian Tefik Vesiqi (29) is still struggling to learn more about the whereabouts of his father, Rrahim, who he says was kidnapped by Serbian paramilitary fighters from his home in the central village of Ribar.
”I will wait for the truth about him even if it takes another 10, 20 years or more, for the rest of my life,” says Vesiqi.
In the nearby village of Gracanica, Svetlana Marinkovic, a Serbian woman, expresses similar expectations about finding her husband, Goran, who she says was abducted by ethnic Albanians.
”There is still hope. It keeps me alive and gives me strength to look after my two young daughters who were three and seven when Goran was kidnapped,” says the 37-year-old.
”I wanted to spare my young children from the tragedy but I could not keep from them the fact they are unlike other children, growing up without one parent.”
For the Red Cross, such despair hampers efforts at reconciliation between the ethnic-Albanian majority and the estimated 120 000 Serbs who remain in the disputed territory of two million people.
”Its clarification can contribute a little bit to appeasement of the tensions and bring lasting peace,” says the organisation’s regional coordinator, Lina Milner.
”We are talking here about healing the wounds of the past. It is obvious that by healing the wounds of the past, the future may be a bit better, a bit more positive.”
Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, declared independence from the former Yugoslav republic in February 2008, after UN-backed talks on its future between Belgrade and Pristina ended in deadlock.
But despite the dispute over Kosovo’s status, the two sides have continued their dialogue on the missing, launched in 2002, about three years after Nato bombs forced Milosevic’s forces out of the territory.
The Red Cross-hosted dialogue now represents the only formal contact between Pristina and Belgrade, even as they battle to gain the diplomatic upper hand respectively for and against Kosovo’s recognition as an independent state.
”The fact that both sides are sitting together, are ready to meet, not only to shake hands, but to discuss and exchange information on the whereabouts on the missing is an achievement,” Milner stresses.
‘The agony of the war continues in my soul’
In charge of overseeing the rule of law in Kosovo, the European Union’s mission, dubbed Eulex, is also one of the main stakeholders in the resolving the fate of the missing.
”The problem is so huge that we cannot afford the luxury of just standing back and training people,” says Alan Robinson, who leads an EU team of forensic experts assigned to Kosovo’s Office on Missing Persons and Forensics (OMPF).
”This needs to be addressed immediately.”
The main task of the office is identifying the remains of about 400 people, which are kept in body bags inside huge refrigerated containers at its compound on the edge of Pristina.
”All of them passed away in a violent death,” says OMPF head Safet Gerxhaliu, pointing to a skull of a middle-aged man with a bullet hole on the temple and a rear exit hole the size of an apple.
Most of the remains have been profiled by DNA samples taken from bones, but blood matches are yet to be made with any of their family members.
Robinson is confident of completing the assignment despite the difficult job of identifying the victims from remains that in some cases are mere bone fragments.
”You have no option but to be optimistic in this kind job,” says the Briton, who has more than five years’ experience on dealing with missing people from Guatemala’s 1980 to 1984 war.
”So, I think that given time, maybe a year, we will have cracked the mystery of why we have been stacked with these cases for so long.”
Despite the ongoing dialogue on the Pristina-Belgrade route and prolonged efforts to resolve the missing cases, their relatives continue to live in the uncertainty brought by war.
”The agony of the war continues in my soul,” Vesiqi says. ”It might be over for others, but not yet for me.” — AFP
