We Are Moving Forward Together
By Hans Haekkerup, SRSG - UNMIK
ZERI, 6 September 2001

Last Monday many of you gathered in front of the National Theatre in protest. Your goal was to bring attention to the issue of the missing and the detained, while calling for the international community to do more to bring answers and closure to these questions.

I would like to answer your call by letting you know exactly what is being done to solve these difficult issues.

As I have said, finding Kosovo's missing is a top priority for UNMIK. The grief and uncertainty of families missing loved ones stands as an impediment to Kosovo's future. This is why UNMIK is putting every means at its disposal to find Kosovo's missing.

Although it has been a slow and painful process, progress is being made. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has now completed its work in Kosovo. Taking over from where the ICTY left off is the UNMIK Police Missing Persons Unit. All exhumation and identification work will now be done by the Missing Persons Unit, who will also coordinate the activities of other international organizations and NGOs working in this area.

The ICTY was comprised of international experts who came to Kosovo, completed their mission and departed. The Missing Persons Unit on the other hand, will become a permanent part of Kosovo's police force. This is why we are working to build capacity within the Unit itself, not simply bring in experts who do the work and then leave. Unfortunately, the issue of the missing is not likely to go away any time soon. So building and training a team of Kosovars to deal with it in the future is essential.

On the scientific side, we have international anthropologists working alongside Kosovo's medical specialists to build expertise at the Pristina Forensics Institute, where all identification of bodies is to be done.

And as you know, family associations of the missing have a forum on the KTC's Working Group for Detainees and Missing Persons. Kosovars are involved at every level of the process.

The ICTY exhumed approximately 4,000 bodies in Kosovo in 1999 and 2000. Of these, there are approximately 1,200 bodies yet to be identified. There are also some 80 sites still to be exhumed in Kosovo. And there are the recently uncovered sites in Serbia near Batanjica. These are all sources of information for answers to our questions.

The head of UNMIK's Missing Persons Unit recently spent two weeks in Belgrade where he worked with FRY officials to put in place a coordination strategy between our governments for identifying and returning the bodies being unearthed in Serbia. Batanjica is high on UNMIK's agenda.

To further help our police in their job I have signed a working agreement with the Sarajevo based International Commission on Missing Persons. This will give our police state-of-the-art DNA testing capabilities as well as a sophisticated software program called DVI (Disaster Victim Identification), which helps match ante mortem and post mortem data to identify bodies. Post mortem data is information taken from bodies at autopsy; ante mortem data is information collected from living family members. When a match is found between the two, there is one less missing person case in Kosovo.

Although we will now be able to use DNA testing, I must tell you that it is no panacea. The traditional way of identification is still the most effective - photos, forensics, testimony from the families. If we are very close to identifying a body but still can't make a match, this is where DNA testing will be important as a backup.

In this regard we need your help. We need every family missing a loved one to come forward to the police or other organizations and give all information about the missing person. Only in this way can we begin to solve missing cases. There are still an estimated 1,500 families in Kosovo who have not yet given this information to the police.

As far as the detained are concerned, when I arrived in Kosovo there were more than 700 Kosovar Albanians detained in the FRY. Over 500 of them have now been released. I am currently working with Deputy Prime Minister Covic on the issue of the remaining 185 cases. UNMIK believes that their detention in Serbia is wrong and we are moving toward the conditions necessary for their return to Kosovo.

Kosovars are part of the process being put in place to deal with these thorny issues. Because ultimately it will be up to the people of Kosovo to solve them.