UNMIK/FR/065/01

Missing Persons

Kosovo's Missing - Everybody's Burden

Beneath a blazing mid-day sun, a handful of people lie on pallets under the shelter of a tent. Just outside the tent, a row of women sits in vigil in chairs in the shade - mothers and wives, cradling photos of husbands, sons and daughters. The mixture of heat and emotions bears down on the little camp. These are the hunger strikers of Graqanicë/Gracanica, who say they are trying to call the world's attention to the fact that nearly 1,200 Serbs have gone missing in the province of Kosovo since 1999.
Sixty-year-old Nebojsa says her son and daughter-in-law disappeared in July 1999 from their home in Pristina.
"My son was a doctor, a specialist in oral surgery. He was a humanitarian worker, not a soldier or policeman, so he thought nothing bad would happen to him," she cries. "We ask assistance from anyone who can shed light on their disappearance."
Forty-five-year-old Dragan says he does not know how to say goodbye to his only son, who he says was kidnapped while going to his job at the Bellaqevc/Belacevac mine. "How can I put this sorrow behind me?" he says. "UNMIK and KFOR know where our people are. Why don't they release them from where they're being held?"

Believing is hope
Back in Pristina, Lt. Barry Dunn is all too familiar with the grief and frustration of these people. He has been with UNMIK Police for two years and has investigated dozens of reports of Kosovo Serbs being held against their will around Kosovo.
"We have physically investigated at least 120 locations where Serbs were supposedly being held as forced laborers," he explains. "Not a single one of them has ever panned out. I know people want to believe that their loved ones are still alive, but it's just not realistic to go along with this line of thinking. We have never found any evidence of camps or prisons in Kosovo."
According to Valerie Brasey a worker with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Pristina, the belief that the missing are being held somewhere is what keeps peoples' hopes alive. Brasey talks to Serbian families about their missing on a daily basis. "The most important thing a family can do if they want to find out what happened to their loved one is to give information about that person to us or to the police," she explains. "But by giving this information, which we call ante mortem data, people feel they are accepting that the missing person is dead. So they don't want to do it." Brasey estimates that there are around 1,500 families in Kosovo (Albanian and Serbian) who have not yet given this information. The Serbian Red Cross also collects ante mortem data from IDPs living in Serbia.

New technologies for the search
These ante mortem data is compared with post mortem data, which is information taken from exhumed bodies and found in police reports and autopsies. When a match is found between the two, there is one less missing person case in Kosovo. In July of this year, UNMIK signed a working agreement with the Sarajevo based International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP). Under it, the UNMIK Police Missing Persons Unit (the entity now coordinating all efforts to locate and identify the missing) will have access to DNA testing capabilities and a sophisticated computer software programme called Disaster Victim Identification (DVI), which helps match ante and post mortem data.
The agreement with ICMP highlights the importance that UNMIK places on finding Kosovo's missing. "The grief of families missing loved ones is something common to all the people of Kosovo,"says Hans Haekkerup, UNMIK's top Administrator in Kosovo. "It crosses ethnic barriers and spares no one. This grief and anger also stands as an impediment to Kosovo's future. This is why finding the missing is a top priority for UNMIK."

Burial sites await investigation
From the beginning, finding Kosovo's missing has been a complex and difficult problem. In 1999, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia exhumed 2,100 bodies; last year it exhumed nearly 2,000. Around 1,200 of these bodies remain unidentified and are reburied in two UNMIK cemeteries (at Theranda/Suva Reka and Dragodan), but mostly throughout Kosovo in municipal cemeteries. All such graves are all individually marked and mapped with an ICTY number. All graves of the unidentified are considered safe because each community believes they hold the bodies of its own missing.
In 2000, ICTY completed its work and withdraw its exhumation crews from Kosovo. Before leaving, it on a list of 60 further sites that could possibly contain further mortal remains. Exhuming these sites is now the job of the UNMIK Police Missing Persons Unit.
Guido van Rillaer, head of the Missing Persons Unit, has just returned from Belgrade where he met with FRY officials in an attempt to formulate a strategy of cooperation on the issue of Kosovo's missing.
"We still have some 60 to 80 sites to exhume in Kosovo," says van Rillaer. "These, along with sites currently being exhumed around Belgrade, will hopefully provide us with answers to some of the outstanding missing cases. And we will be using DNA testing to establish missing links."
Nevertheless, according to van Rillaer, DNA testing is no panacea. "The traditional ways of identification are 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."

Every family's pain
Meanwhile, the UNMIK/FRY Contact Group on Missing Persons has brought a group of Serbian journalists to inspect the UN cemetery at Suharekë/Suva Reka. Advisor to the FRY President on Missing Persons, Gradimir Nalic, is part of the visiting team. Nalic says that his work with ICTY in Bosnia showed him that the real answers about the missing come only when the families begin to communicate. "It will be the same for Kosovo," he says. "But whether these bodies are Serbian, Albanian or Roma," he says, gesturing to the graves around him, "what is important is that they are identified and that their families are notified."
There are many families in Kosovo living with the agony of uncertainty. Just five kilometers down the road from the cemetery where the Serbian group is looking for answers about its missing, lies the town of Suharekë/Suva Reka where 43 women and children were killed in March of 1999. All of their bodies are also still missing.

Contact: E. Beardsley
(038) 504 604 Ext. 5797
E-mail: beardsley@un.org

Note for editors
The full document may be consulted online in English at http://www.unmik.org/. Albanian and Serbian versions can be provided.

For a selection of photographs, please contact Mr Ky Chung at 038 504-604 ext. 5467