Eurasia Press & News
Leaders in Belgrade and Pristina are perpetuating distrust by using the issue of the remaining missing persons from the Kosovo conflict for political purposes, ethnic Albanians and Serbs told researcher Nina Kaufmann.
During the Kosovo conflict and its aftermath, men, women and children from all communities in Kosovo were forcibly disappeared. While some were found alive in prisons in early 2000, most were found in mass graves.
Today, 1,621 people remain missing, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC. While resolving every one of the open cases is not possible because of how the disappearances happened, there is still a lot hope that – if information is received about potential grave sites and the issue of previously misidentified cases is resolved – hundreds of families could receive answers to the question of what happened to their loved ones in the war.
The families’ ‘right to know’ is granted by international humanitarian and human rights law and receiving the remains of missing family members is, for many, an important step in moving forward.
While the number of missing persons being identified has stagnated in recent years, the issue is increasingly hitting the headlines in both Kosovo and Serbia. There have been claims that the missing persons issue has been politicised and that the focus is no longer on increased humanitarian collaboration between Pristina and Belgrade to find those who are still missing, but that the issue is simply being used as a tool in a blame game between the capitals.
This political instrumentalisation of the missing persons issue not only hinders collaboration in finding and identifying those still missing, but also contributes to an increasing distrust between the ethnic Albanian and Serb communities living in Kosovo today.
These findings are based on my study entitled The Unresolved Fate of the Missing, conducted in the cities of Pristina and Mitrovica in the spring of 2022, exploring how the issue of missing persons from the 1998-99 conflict has an impact on trust between ethnic Albanians and Serbs living in Kosovo. Sixteen in-depth interviews were conducted with people of both Albanian and Serb origin who work with families of missing persons.
The study found that the issue of missing persons does not in itself foster distrust between the communities. However, as politicians on both sides increasingly politicise the issue, playing into existing war narratives that are reinforced by a lack of contact between the two ethnic groups, it continues to affect inter-ethnic trust in Kosovo and will do as long as it remains unresolved.
One-sided narratives
In Kosovo today, spaces where Albanians and Serbs can meet and share their experiences of the violence in 1998-99 are few, and the narratives around the war are often contrasting and one-sided.
There is a strong “aggressor-victim binary”, said one interviewee who wanted to be quoted anonymously, and this makes discussions about missing persons which include members of all Kosovo’s ethnic communities complicated. In public statements, the number of missing persons is often tweaked by politicians to suit their own narratives. Kosovo Albanian politicians rarely mention non-Albanian victims. The same goes for non-Serb victims in Serbia.
One-sided narratives can also be seen in the memorialisation of those who were killed during the war. One interviewee who asked to remain anonymous spoke about the example of a market that was bombed in Mitrovica – “and there was a Roma girl who was killed, she was not included in their memorial plaque [alongside the ethnic Albanian victims of the blast]”.
Milica Radovanovic, a researcher at the New Social Initative in the Serb-majority northern part of Mitrovica who was interviewed for the survey, said that non-Albanian victims are a “taboo topic” in Kosovo. “When the highest officials talk about this topic, they talk only about Albanian victims, and not about Serbs and others from non-majority communities that were killed during the Kosovo war,” Radovanovic said.
On the other side of the border, in Serbia, mass graves of Kosovo Albanians are almost never memorialised – “not even a sign… not even a small memorial”, said another interviewee, who wanted to remain anonymous. The interviewee said the Serbian authorities were attempting to “erase all [their] wrongdoings”.
One example is the Batajnica mass grave, where the bodies of 744 Kosovo Albanians were found in the early 2000s. The grave lies within a police centre that is not publicly accessible, and while campaigners have called for a memorial centre to be established at the location, the authorities have ignored them.
Segregated communities, different realities
Kosovo society remains divided, almost 24 years after the war ended. From a young age, children in ethnic Albanian and Serb communities are told different stories about what happened in the war, and as they grow up, they follow different radio stations and television channels, and listen to different politicians.
By 2022, 90 per cent of people in the Serb community in Kosovo had personal documents issued by the Kosovo authorities, according to a recent study by the NGO Aktiv. But one interviewee highlighted that most Serbs still rely on Belgrade “as their protector and duty holder”.
In a situation in which ethnic Albanians and Serbs live in physically segregated communities, but also in different realities when it comes to education, media and politics, how politicians talk about the legacies of the war has an immense impact on the public opinion. This includes the missing persons issue.
Interviewees, both ethnic Albanians and Serbs, argued that the current political discourse around the atrocities committed during the war is one of the main issues fuelling distrust between communities in Kosovo today. “As long as there is this kind of atmosphere, I am afraid that the missing persons issue cannot be secondary or tertiary, it is one of the main issues that separate us and create tensions among us,” said Serbeze Haxhiaj, a journalist for BIRN and other media outlets who was interviewed for the survey.
However, the missing persons issue does not have to be a trigger for distrust and animosity, said Sara Salihu from the Missing Persons Resource Centre, MPRC. “Two things must be distinguished – criminals or those perpetrators who committed crimes during the war, and then ordinary people,” Salihu said in an interview for the survey.
“You know, the crimes should not be generalised, because there are people, individuals who have committed those crimes, not the whole nation. Once people start to think like this, many problems will be solved. But then again, it is the leaders who are not letting people heal and move forward,” she added.
Lack of cooperation, toxic discourse
The question of whether information contained in official wartime archives that could reveal new clandestine graves (primarily in Serbia) has been a recurring topic in discussions in the EU-facilitated Pristina-Belgrade dialogue, and in political debate in general.
However, the Serbian state is reluctant to open up its classified archives and has repeatedly stated that it will only consider doing so if Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA archives are also opened up. Whether the KLA had structured archives is unclear, however, as it operated as a guerrilla group.
Nevertheless, one interviewee pointed out that even if there were no structured archives, there are likely to be people in Kosovo who do know something about missing Serbs and members of other non-majority communities.
Human rights activist and theatre director Kushtrim Koliqi said in an interview for the survey that “even if there are no real archives, there are real people who have witnessed those wrongdoings”.
The lack of cooperation and the reluctance to share information hinders progress in finding the missing, but also has a strong negative spillover effect on trust between the ethnic Albanian and Serb communities in Kosovo, keeping people “barricaded along ethnic lines”, as Serbeze Haxhiaj put it.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which facilitates the Pristina-Belgrade bilateral working group on missing persons, has regularly stressed the importance of keeping the issue of missing persons a humanitarian one, a non-politicised issue “with strong political support”.
The recent trend, however, has been in the opposite direction. Not only do politicians in Kosovo and Serbia mostly talk about missing persons from their own community, both Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic have also repeatedly used the missing persons issue as a convenient tool for blaming the other for not admitting that crimes were also committed by their own side during the war, and for poor judicial follow-up on these crimes.
As Koliqi put it, the issue of missing persons “is politicised not on the level to be a political issue to be fixed, but to be used and misused as political credit, to accuse each other and to offend each other. And that is problematic because only with political will this issue can be resolved, especially when it comes to the archives.”
Both governments call for increased collaboration, but this is most often phrased as a threat or ultimatum, rather than an invitation. The way in which politicians frame the need of collaboration impacts the public opinion.
As Natasa Bozilovic of the MPRC said of her experience of working with families of missing persons, “the more radical statements the leaders give, the more the families go apart. I have to say that last year, there was some setback, in the cooperation between the families and between the communities in general.”
Bozilovic was referring to the fact that the Pristina-Belgrade working group on missing persons has been deadlocked because the Kosovo delegation wants the head of the Serbian delegation, Veljko Odalovic, removed because of his alleged involvement in the war.
The MPRC argues that this has unnecessarily politicised the process of finding missing persons to the detriment of the situation in the field, with a particularly bad impact on the dialogue between the families.
Another interviewee, who asked to remain anonymous, also said that a negative trend can be seen when it comes to the political discourse about missing persons. “It is a cruel, easy topic to misuse… [because it] also touches people who do not have family members that are missing,” the interviewee said.
Different stories, common pain
While the narratives of the war differ in ethnic Albanian and Serb communities in Kosovo, “the pain of a mother doesn’t have a national [ethnic] background”, one interviewee said.
There are examples of initiatives that have been successful in creating an environment that enables conversations and exchanges of views. Since 2017, the MPRC, with its main office in Pristina, has brought together families from different ethnic communities to share their experiences and jointly advocate increased efforts in the search for missing persons.
The MPRC was founded by two elderly men, Bajram Qerkinaj, a Kosovo Albanian missing a son, and Milorad Trufunovic, a Serb missing a brother. One interviewee said that when they started meeting 15 years ago, “they were shouting at each other, accusing each other”.
But when the two men actually began talking to each other, realising that they shared the same kind of pain, they started working together. They became the main drivers in creating the MPRC, which is still one of the few platforms through which Kosovo Albanians and Serbs work for the same cause.
Natasa Bozilovic and Sara Salihu, programme officers at the MPRC, tell stories of how families from different backgrounds who get involved their activities are usually reluctant to collaborate at first, but relatively quickly find common ground when they are able to express their feelings in a neutral environment.
As a representative from a Pristina-based peace organisation explained, the atmosphere at the joint meetings organised by the MPRC is often better than in society in general: “On the political scene, both parties try to blame the other side… but once you are in a meeting with the family members, you see that the pain is the same, the wish is the same, the goal is the same, so it does not matter if you are Albanian or Serb.”
While the example of the MPRC shows that finding common understanding across community borders is possible, the reality is that the initiative is almost one of a kind. Only political will in both Kosovo and Serbia can change this pattern, interviewees argued.
Civil society initiatives to improve relations and cooperation between the communities are immensely important but cannot change a society in which politicians are working in the opposite direction, they said.
Political will and bilateral collaboration is also needed to make progress in finding and identifying missing persons from the 1998-99 war. The standstill in this process and the political blame game threatens the chances of giving families of missing persons answers, but also risks triggering more animosity and distrust.
The issue of missing persons, an issue of human suffering, is in principle a humanitarian one, but currently, Salihu said, politicians on both sides have “taken the process hostage”.
