Kosovo's Missing Persons

Little or No Hope

According to the Association of Families of Missing and Abducted Persons of Kosovo, 20 percent of the Serbs on their list went missing before the 1999 NATO bombing, five percent during the bombing, and 75 percent after the arrival of peacekeepers in the province

AIM Belgrade, February 26, 2001

One of the placards relatives of missing Kosovo Serbs regularly display during their frequent protests says: "Fourteen Kostics have been abducted -- Where are they?" The Kostics were a big family of workers and farmers from the village of Retimlje, near Orahovac. During a three-day operation of the Kosovo Liberation Army in the Orahovac region from July 17 to July 19, 1998, at the time the OSCE verification mission was present there, farmer Andjelko Kostic, 62, was killed in front of his home, and then all who were present -- men, women, and children -- were taken prisoner.

Andjelko's son was given two hours to bury his father, and the men where then herded into a truck and taken in the direction of the village of Opterusa. They were never heard from again and nothing is known of their fate. A total of 43 Serbs were abducted, among whom were the 14 Kostics. Pavle Kostic, the other son of the murdered Andjelko, could not reach the village on the day his family disappeared because of the fighting. Today he lives in the Belgrade suburb of Zeleznik with his mother, his sister, and her three children. He has no job. Together with other members of the Association of Families of Missing and Abducted Persons of Kosovo he constantly calls on representatives of the new authorities, foreign embassies, and international organizations. "They tell us: 'We understand how you feel and we'll do what we can.' We don't know whether they understand how we feel, but nothing has been done," says Pavle Kostic.

A host of international organizations deals with the people of all nationalities who went missing in Kosovo. Each one of them has its own data, procedures, methodology, and priorities. Among them is, first of all, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the most active in the search for the missing persons, and followed by UNMIK, that is, its office for human rights and joint tasks with which a bureau for imprisoned and missing persons has been founded, as well as a police unit for missing people. The OSCE is also there with its unit for missing persons, as well as the Victim Recovery and Identification Commission (VRIC), the non-government International Commission for Missing Persons, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and a special High Commissioner envoy for human rights.

Shortly after he took office, Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica formed a Commission for Missing and Displaced Persons and Refugees.

A federal Commission for Kosovo, headed by Momcilo Trajkovic, was also established and announced it will form a subcommittee for the missing. After the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia ended, relatives of missing people created several associations to deal with this issue. The results of their endeavors, however, brought little comfort to families searching for their beloved ones.

According to the ICRC, the fate of over 3,500 people who went missing in Kosovo since the beginning of 1998 is still unknown. In an updated version of the book on the missing the ICRC is preparing, the names of 2,700 missing ethnic Albanians and 830 non-Albanians (of whom, according to UNMIK, about 550 are Serb and about 300 of other ethnic groups) will be listed. The Association, however, has a list of 1,300 missing Serbs. ICRC representatives say that the difference is due to the fact that not all families have approached them and that in many cases, whole families have disappeared, leaving no one to fill out the necessary paper work (the ICRC accepts applications only from close relatives). The Association has numerous files on exactly such cases: in June, 1999, the entire Sutakovic family was abducted: father, mother, and their three sons, ages 20, 18 and 12; on July 17, 1988, on the outskirts of Orahovac the Baljosevic family was abducted -- father, mother, son, daughter-in-law and 13-month-old baby. According to the Association -- and its data is not disputed by the International Committee of the Red Cross -- 20 percent of the missing Serbs on their list were abducted before the NATO bombing started on March 24, 1999, five percent during the bombing, and 75 percent after the arrival of peacekeepers in Kosovo.

Many of the abductions were witnessed by others. On July 12, 1999, a woman and her daughter-in-law were present when the woman's husband and son were taken away. They saw five KLA fighters in uniform pushing them into a white Mercedes and taking them away in an unknown direction. They remembered the license plates and reported the abduction immediately to the German KFOR units in charge of the town. The man and his son were never found and their kidnappers were not discovered.

Most representatives of international organizations in charge of missing persons are convinced that many of the victims are no longer alive and that it will be hard to find their bodies. "We found the majority of missing Albanians, some 1,000, in Serbian prisons," says Francois Blanchi from the ICRC."The same, however, does not go for non-Albanians. Missing Serbs, for instance, were not found in regular prisons in Kosovo, neither in Bondsteel, nor in Pristina, nor in Mitrovica. Stories of secret camps, especially in northern Albania, persist, although they were never officially confirmed. Exhumation and identification of the bodies are a story in their own right. The ICRC has a list of 3,200 exhumed bodies, of which almost 1,300 have yet to be identified. The organization says that there are 17 unexamined mass graves (which the Hague Tribunal is not interested in). All clothes and personal property found on the bodies exhumed from the graveyards in Pristina, Gnjilane, Djakovica, Pec, Prizren, and villages near Kacanik and Glogovac, were shown to the relatives of the missing persons on three occasions -- Albanians and Serbs were separately invited for identification. This helped to identify a number of people, but only the body of monk Hariton (without the head because it could not be found) was delivered to priests for burial. When the bodies of other people are in question, the families were told there was no adequate "legal and technical" cooperation, and that therefore they could not be given the bodies to bury them in their graveyards in accordance with their customs.

Unofficially, international organization representatives thus define the main problems: only the former embattled sides -- the KLA and the Yugoslav army and Interior ministry -- can say in what currently unknown locations the battles were waged and where additional bodies can be found. But by doing that, however, they would incriminate themselves or others close to them, and today all fear responsibility for war crimes. Witnesses, when there are any, are afraid to speak.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, of 20,500 persons who went missing during the war according to ICRC data, only 10 percent have been found.

Roksanda Nincic

(AIM)