Kosovo’s Disappeared

 

The history of Kosovo is a very complex story. For years, the country has been regarded as a problem in the Balkans. Since the death of General Josip Broz Tito in 1980, Yugoslavia began to face various economic, social and political ailments. The constitution was adopted and gave administrative autonomy to eight federal units. Yet In 1981, the Albanian population of Kosovo considered that level of autonomy to be inadequate. They therefore began demonstrating to demand republic status for Kosovo. Demonstrations were repressed with the use of force, which led Kosovo to create a police state to the detriment of the Albanian population.

The situation became increasingly desperate. The Serbian and Montenegrin populations, minorities in Kosovo, had been complaining for years about harassment and attacks by the Albanian population (the majority in the country). In the mid-1980s, there was even talk of genocide on the part of the Albanian population. In the 1990s, two visions opposed each other. The first, that of Milošević, who regarded Kosovo as an internal matter of Serbia, and the second that of Rugova, who wanted full independence for Serbia but through peaceful action. With the Dyaton Peace Accords in 1995, which ended the conflict in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Albanians decided that without armed conflict it would be impossible to achieve their goal of independence. Thus, began a series of terrorist attacks, which targeted not only the Serbian police and the Yugoslav army, but also innocent civilians. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were renowned for decapitating their adversaries. Consequently,  Belgrade’s response was harsh. Reprisals triggered a wave of Kosovo Albanian refugees. The conflict ended with NATO bombing on 11 June 1999.

In 2022, an Eulex (European Union Rule of Law Mission) investigation updated the numbers of exhumations of corpses in mass graves. The conflict in the summer of 1999 resulted in the deaths of about 13,000 people and over 1 million refugees and displaced persons. But unfortunately, several victims are still missing. It is estimated that about one-tenth of the victims are missing.

Ioanna Lachana, spokesperson for Eulex in Kosovo said: “The official statistics updated at this moment tell us that there are 1,621 people, or rather bodies still to be found on the ground and given a name and a burial. The ethnicity of the deceased? We make no distinction, the data on their group affiliations are protected by secrecy, we are not in Kosovo to create further tension between the two sides’. The percentage of victims not found in the Kosovo conflict is said to be around 10 per cent. It has also been noted that compared to the conflict between Croatia and Bosnia (deadlier than the Kosovo conflict), the percentage of unaccounted-for victims is much higher.  Ioanna Lachana explains how ‘On Bosnian soil, aerial and satellite images made it quite easy to identify the bulk of the mass graves that had been dug. In Kosovo, this was not possible. Those who perpetrated the war crimes and then buried the corpses did so with the aim of making it difficult to find the bodies. A large proportion of the victims were buried in cemeteries, making it virtually impossible to locate them.”

It is therefore extremely important to highlight this conflict and the devastating repercussions it had. Although the last victims missing in this clash will probably never be found, we must not stop talking about it, and educate people about the history of these atrocities.

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