On the other hand, the Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR Kosovo) this year also called on citizens to turn off the lights tonight, in memory of the missing. At the same time, they say that there is an institutional failure in solving the issue of the missing. During that time, the highest Pristina officials, as in previous years, accused Serbia of alleged genocide.
YIHR: Turn off the lights for five minutes
On the eve of the Day of the Missing, the Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR Kosovo) announced the traditional call to the citizens of Kosovo to turn off the lights in their homes for five minutes at 20.30:XNUMX p.m.
It is an action that has been implemented for years with the aim of paying respect to the missing. Now they are reporting that there are 1.592 people on the list of missing persons.
In the call published exactly one year ago, according to the data of this organization, there were 1.615 people on the list of missing persons.
"With five minutes of darkness in our homes, to sympathize with the pain and darkness in which the relatives of 26 missing persons have been living for 1.592 years. Turning off the lights has become a tradition, through which every year, on the same day and at the same time, we have the opportunity to remember the missing persons together," they stated.
And while it says that the families are still waiting for the resolution of the fate of the missing, YIHR also states that this year we are also witnessing an institutional failure in clarifying this issue.
"The right to know the truth is one of the basic principles of dealing with the past, so we call on the Government of Kosovo to seriously approach the issue of missing persons in accordance with the rules of international humanitarian law. The main request was and remains the clarification of the fate of the missing persons," they state.
About the crime in Meja
The crime that happened on April 27 in the village of Meja is remembered by the Kosovo public as "the most mass execution and the biggest massacre in the war in Kosovo during 1998-1999".
According to available documents, collected by the Humanitarian Law Fund, 376 people were killed.
Serbian forces then surrounded Losa Reka (Rekën e Keqe) and the Caragoja valley (Ligun e Carragojëj) in the vicinity of Djakovica, and men in groups of 15 to 60 years old from 15 villages in the district of Djakovica were killed, as a reprisal for the previous killing of a group of Serbian policemen , according to the HLC.
According to verdicts by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in cases against Serbian military and police officials, the attacks on the villages were part of a military operation called Reka, in which members of the Yugoslav Army, Serbian police and paramilitary units killed at least 377 civilians, of whom 36 were under the age of 18. Thousands were deported to Albania.
A few years ago, BIRN wrote in a detailed text based on testimony at the Hague Tribunal that some of the key witnesses who revealed details about this case were insiders from the Serbian and Yugoslav army and police. BIRN stated that, analyzing the evidence from The Hague, they discovered that around 30 people were involved in this case. They also pointed out that several suspects were under investigation, but that no one was prosecuted.
RECOM: "No body, no crime"
Reconciliation network "REKOM" announced in last year's advertisement that "the remains of 309 Albanians who were killed during the military-police operation on April 27 and 26, 1999 in the village of Meja and the surrounding villages, were exhumed in 2001 and 2002 from mass graves on the police field in Batajnica near Belgrade", and that not all remains have been found yet.
Speaking about the events in this village, they claim that in mid-May 1999, Slobodan Milošević and the highest representatives of the MUP, DB and VJ "agreed on the action 'No bodies, no crime'".
"Immediately afterwards, the bodies of the victims, who were last seen in Meja and the surrounding villages on April 27 or 28, 1999, and buried in Batajnica, were exhumed from the cemetery in Djakovica," they stated.
Kurti laid flowers at the monument to the missing persons
After another failed attempt to constitute the Kosovo Assembly, the highest representatives of the outgoing government, now MPs, led by Aljbin Kurti, laid flowers at the Monument to the Missing Persons near the assembly itself.
As Pristina media reports, there were also representatives of the association and family members of the missing, as well as the British ambassador in Pristina, Jonathan Hargreaves.
The president of the Kosovo government's commission for missing persons, Andin Hoti, said that the issue of missing persons is not an "individual wound", but affects "the entire Kosovo society".
He emphasized that normalcy cannot be achieved without discovering the truth and establishing justice, but also that disappearances, murders and hiding bodies in mass graves are "crimes against humanity and pure genocide, for which justice is still sought in international instances."
Hoti underlined his determination that he will not stop until the fate of the last missing person is known.
Osmani: Oath for Justice
Today, the President of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, spoke out, stating that Meja is "one of the deepest wounds of Kosovo".
"376 innocent lives were cruelly taken by the genocidal regime of Serbia, just because they were Albanians. The wounds left by this tragedy are still open, but our pain and determination have united to prevent the truth from being forgotten," she stated.
In a post on Facebook, Osmani also said:
"Every person killed and every person forcibly disappeared during the war, every dream forcibly interrupted, is our oath for justice."
Haradinaj: War wounds
The leader of AAK, Ramuš Haradinaj, also spoke. Speaking about the number of victims, he stated that the number was one higher than Osmani.
He said that 26 years ago in Meja, "Serbian occupying forces committed one of the biggest massacres in Kosovo, cruelly executing 377 Albanian brothers and sisters, of both religions."
He claims that many of them are still missing today.
"We never stop searching or remembering. We miss them at every celebration, at every joy. The wounds of war will not heal without the full elucidation of the fate of each missing person," he said.
The Post of Kosovo issued a postage stamp dedicated to the missing
And today the Post of Kosovo issued a postage stamp dedicated to missing persons.
They announced that they are honoring the "thousands of citizens who forcibly disappeared during the war in Kosovo", and that it "conveys a message of collective memory, shared pain and unwavering commitment to discovering their fate".
"As a bearer of history and our collective memory, this time the postage stamp raises its voice for justice - a voice that remains alive and inalienable in our social consciousness," they stated.
OSCE: Answers about the fate of the disappeared a condition for trust
On the occasion of the Day of the Missing, the OSCE also announced, stating that this mission respects the memory of the missing persons and stands in solidarity with their families.
"This day reminds us of the importance of justice, truth and collective efforts to heal the wounds of the past," they said.
They say that answers about the fate of the missing are necessary in order to build trust, but also for the families to finally get an answer to a decades-old question.
Missing in Brussels
The issue of the missing on paper is one of the main topics of the stalled dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina, which the new EU envoy, Peter Sorensen, is now trying to revive.
As part of this dialogue, in May 2023, the Declaration on Missing Persons was signed, which consists of nine points, among which is the one allowing access to all information and documents that would help shed light on the fate of the missing.
Despite the agreement, the parties continued to accuse each other of concealing information about the missing from the other community, that is, of the lack of cooperation and facilitating the excavation. On the other hand, the International Community continued to call for the implementation of the Declaration on the Missing.
Associations of the families of the missing people looked at all this without much expectation that the search process would speed up. They criticized Belgrade and Prishtina, viewed the declaration itself with skepticism, some saw it as "political camouflage" - without expecting that the process of resolving the fate of the missing would be accelerated.
In the new UN report on the work of UNMIK for the period from September of last year to March of this year, it is pointed to the meeting of the chief negotiators in Brussels on December 17, 2023, and to the fact that the parties expressed their commitment to the implementation of the Declaration on the Missing, but also that the chief negotiator of Belgrade, Petar Petković, left the meeting of the Joint Commission for Missing Persons on January 15 in protest over the closure of several Serbian institutions in Kosovo.
Statistics
According to the Humanitarian Law Fund and the Kosovo Humanitarian Law Fund, which developed a database related to war events, from January 1, 1998 to December 31, 2000, a total of 13.535 people were killed or disappeared during and in the context of the armed conflict in Kosovo.
The victims are 10.812 Albanians, 2.197 Serbs and 526 victims of Roma, Bosnian, Montenegrin and other communities.
The fate of most of them has already been revealed, but nothing is known about about 1.600 people.
According to yesterday's YIHR, there are 1.592 missing persons on the list, which is 23 less than when they advertised exactly one year ago, when they announced that 1.615 people were still being sought.
Identification
In the past year, the Commission for Missing Persons under the Kosovo government has reported on several occasions about the excavations in search of the missing throughout Kosovo, as well as the finding and burial of the remains near Podujevo, in Djakovica, as well as the identification of the remains in this city.
In its report for the first half of 2024, EULEX stated that they participated in 14 field operations and performed two exhumations, in cooperation with the Institute for Forensic Medicine.
They announced that ten persons were identified during these activities, including six reported as missing, and that the remains of nine persons were handed over to the families and authorities.
