UNMIK ON AIR
13 May 2003
Mass Graves
(Andrea Saula)

Halit Berisha: We have been waiting in a nightmare for years. Of course it is a relief for all family members if we put their bones to rest in their homes.

Halit Berisha from Suva Reka/Suhareka, whose family lost 56 members in the war in 1999.

Hello and welcome to UNMIK ON AIR with Sputnik Kilambi and David Balham.

Last week the bodies of 37 Kosovo Albanians killed during the war and exhumed from a mass grave in Batajnica near Belgrade were returned to Kosovo. It was the biggest such return of remains from Serbian graves so far.

Four years after the war in Kosovo, it is known that almost 4000 people, from both the ethnic Albanian and Serb communities are thought to have gone missing during the war.

All are believed dead – by everyone except their families, that is. Many families still cling to the hope that their loved ones are still alive. For them, the only proof is to have bodies returned to them.

So after four years of waiting, families from Suva Reka, Djakovica and Decani hope that some of the 37 bodies, handed by Serbian authorities to UNMIK, belong to their relatives and that will be able to lay them to rest properly.

Halit Berisha is one of them.

Halit Berisha: We have some information that there are some bodies from the Berisha family. My brother and 55 members of my extended family; they not only committed massacres on the 26 of March 1999. In fact they sent them to Serbia as dead prisoners. This is the biggest human crime.

Several dozens relatives of missing Albanians observed the handover of the remains at the Merdare crossing into Serbia proper. They came in silence.

Also at Merdare for the handover of the bodies was a huddle of people carrying a sign saying “bring back the living too”. Nysrete Kumnova, head of the Association “Mothers’ calls” has eight members of her family missing. Still she hopes against growing evidence that they might be still alive.

Nysrete Kumnova: Serbia knows how to keep the secret and how to play with our emotions; the way they did for four years now with our loved ones…it is a relief because bones cannot remain in the land of Serbia. We will bury them with dignity because they gave their lives for this freedom.

In June of 2001. Serbian Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic confirmed for the first time that mass graves in Serbia do exist. He showed media a seven-minute video tape of the exhumation of bodies from a refrigerator truck pulled from the Danube River in 1999.

The bodies were then taken to a mass grave near Belgrade in Batajnica – a police camp - used to train special antiterrorist units, the SAJ. Serbian police officially started an investigation but till now no major progress hasn’t been seen.

The remains, brought from Serbia, were among the first of some 800 that have been exhumed at three sites in Serbia over the last two years.

All 37 bodies have been positively identified through DNA matching, by the International Committee for Missing Persons. It’s a process Serbian authorities handed over the bodies after matching bone samples with the DNA of people whose relatives are missing has identified them.

Anil Amar with the ICMP office in Pristina says the process has been sped up by cooperation with the Serbian authorities.

Anil Amar: We had around agreement in 2001 with CCK and by that we were allowed to monitor and technically be present at all sites and at all exhumations. So everything went up to scientifically accurate standards. The UNMIK and CCK, combined, will complete the final process of identifications.

All that remains now is for forensic experts to examine the bodies before the remains are returned to families. This is because in certain cases a DNA match can identify the family a body belongs to, but not whether it is, for example, the father or the brother.

Head of UNMIK’s Office of Missing Persons and Forensics, Jose Pablo Baraybar, expects that other bodies will be soon transferred to Kosovo.

Baraybar points out that there is no hidden reason why only 37 bodies have been handed over so far. He explains that, in order to respect the wish of families, all dead bodies from each family will be delivered at same time.

Jose Pablo Baraybar: In the number of case that are not here today, we have agreed with the Serbian authorities to work together in order to resolve those cases It is important to say that this will happen extremely soon and we also have participation of the first Kosovar forensic expert

Ragip Zekolli, head of the Government Commission for the Missing, says that more pressure should be put on Serbian government. But he also and asks family members to be strong and gradually accept the reality that the missing are in all probability dead.

Ragip Zekolli: This day is a very painful and sensitive one, it is important because for the first time of bodies from Serbia are brought in big numbers.

Finding and finally burying the dead, while painful, is one of the only ways of laying the grief of war to rest.

That’s all for today…