Kosovo Finds 11 War Victims in Hidden Graves in 2020

Experts from Serbia, Kosovo and the EU search a grave site in Kizevak in Serbia this month. Photo: EPA-EFE/Djordje Savic.

The head of Kosovo’s Missing Persons Commission, Kushtrim Gara, told BIRN that exhumations were carried out at ten locations in Kosovo and Serbia this year and “the mortal remains of at least 11 persons, victims of the war, were found and exhumed”.

As well as the new discoveries, Gara said that in 2020, “the mortal remains of four people identified years ago have been returned to their families for reburial”.

The most recent finds happened on December 18, when the remains of one war victim in Rahovec/Orahovac and some bone parts of another victim in Prizren’s Tusuz neighbourhood were found and sent for forensic analysis and DNA identification, Gara added.

“After identification they will be handed over to the family members for reburial,” he said.

Around 6,000 missing persons from the Kosovo war have already been found and identified, but Gara cautioned that there are still 1,638 suspected victims whose whereabouts are not known. These are mainly Kosovo Albanians, but the figure also includes Serbs.

In early December, excavations started after a mass grave was found at an open-cast mine in the southern Serbian village of Kizevak.

Serbia’s Commission for Missing Persons said that the mass grave contained the remains of between 15 and 17 people, which are almost certainly those of ethnic Albanians who were killed during the war in Kosovo.

The find at Kizevak was the latest in a series of mass graves discovered in Serbia. Victims of wartime massacres by Serbian forces were transported to Serbia and buried in clandestine graves as part of attempts to cover up the crimes.

During 2020, there were also excavations at five locations in Kosovo: at a Muslim cemetery in North Mitrovica, in the villages of Polane and Syrigane, and at cemeteries in Rahovec/Orahovac and Prizren.

In 2021, excavations will continue in Mitrovica, Prizren, and Syrigane, said Gara.

He explained that the main obstacle to finding the remaining missing persons from the war is the lack of credible information.

“Serbia is constantly being asked to open its archives, in particular the archives of the former Yugoslav Army, and make information from these archives available for this process,” he said.

These military archives are a state secret, but Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has offered to supply such information if the archives of the Kosovo Liberation Army are also opened up to reveal locations of buried Serb war victims.

However, it has been suggested in Kosovo that because the Kosovo Liberation Army was a guerrilla force, it did not maintain such archives.