-They are also here, close to my husband

A woman - a mother, a grandmother in front of a pile of clothes and other sundry items – 3 painful years later that’s all that’s left of her family members who were assumed missing since the spring of 1999. Painful as the experience is, it is the irony of such situations that she is in fact one of the lucky ones.

Hello and welcome to UNMIK on Air with Sputnik Kilambi and Martin Redi.

Four years after the war, the issue of the missing is still a burning one. The lack of closure to the grief of people who don’t know what happened to their loved ones makes it difficult to forget or forgive the things that happened in the past. The list of those whose fate remains unknown is getting shorter by the day, but thousands are still unaccounted for.

Jose Pablo Baryabar is the head of the UNMIK Office for missing persons and forensics, a department often criticized by the media on the grounds it was not doing enough. Baraybar insists his office has done its best. Most of the bodies of the missing have been found, he says, the problem is that the process of identification takes an enormous amount of time, and it may take a lot more:

Jose Pablo Baryabar: We recognize that the process will last longer and by longer I mean that this office as such may not exist by then. And why is this because there are two levels in the program- regarding dead people we have to find them, exhume them, examine them and them comes the second part which is identification. That is primarily done through DNA test and as we have always said we do not control the DNA testing. And the paste by which that process is undertaken will determine the past by which the problem is resolved

Still, the families of the missing need results. They have spent years waiting for a sign whether their loved ones are alive or dead. Unfortunately, says Baryabar, the search for the missing depends a lot on the available information, and the ones in the know are not necessarily sharing that information:

Jose Pablo Baryabar: The officials on any side are reluctant to collaborate with us. The issue is not an issue of “You were a state therefore you should give me something and I should give you anything. That is not the point, the point is that we have a lot of missing persons, and this reflects on a lot of families who do not have a clue of what happened and it is insane to keep these people just waiting and waiting and waiting.

LINK: But the people continue to wait, and as Bexhet Shala, the head of the CDHRL points out, this impacts not only on the families of the missing but on the society as a whole. The whole question of the return of IDPs, he says becomes much more difficult when so many wounds are still open.

Bexhet Shala: the unknown fate of the missing has a direct impact on the security situation in Kosovo and it will un-doubtedly have further implications. This issue reflects especially on the process of returns since a few places that have been marked for returns have people missing. And as long as their fate remains unknown it is difficult to talk about a safe or sustainable return for minorities.

Of course, it is not only the Albanians who are missing. There are several hundred Serbs who disappeared during or right after the war. And their family members are making the same requests to the authorities. They too want to know what happened. Baraybar rejects charges that his office is paying way too much attention to the missing Albanians, and to the detriment of missing Serbs.

Jose Pablo Baryabar: What has to be understood as well is that it is a fact that the proportion of missing persons from one ethnicity to the other ethnicity is at ratio four to one, so no matter what you do , you will always encounter more victims of one group than the other. It is a matter of probability and it is important for us to make this understood by the families, we are not favoring anybody. We are treating all the cases with the same importance

There is one silver lining though despite the pain and lack of closure to their grief - a sense of mutual understanding and sympathy amongst the families of the missing on both sides. Behxhet Shala again.

Behxhet Shala: when I met with some family members of missing Serbs in Belgrade they did not insist only on solving the issue of missing Serbs but also of the missing Albanians. When I told them for example that an Albanian family has up to 9 missing family members, that it has 4 or 5 missing sons, believe me, they started crying. Since they felt it in their own skin they understand the pain of Albanians.

Time, they say, is the great healer, but for the families of the missing time seems to be standing still. Despite the best efforts of the people involved in identifying the missing.

That does it for this edition of UNMIK ON AIR. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for more.