Long search for Kosovo's missing

By Matt Prodger
BBC News, Kosovo

More than 2,500 people are still unaccounted for from the war

Over recent weeks investigators in Kosovo have discovered mass graves containing the bodies of 37 civilians murdered in 1998.

It is the largest discovery of Serb victims of atrocities from the Kosovo war, which pitched the Kosovo Liberation Army and Nato on one side against the Serbian security forces and Yugoslavia on the other.

On the outskirts of the town of Malisevo, a few dozen metres from newly-built homes, a forensic scientist pulls back a tarpaulin and starts photographing a hole in the ground.

In the shallow grave are 13 human skeletons piled on top of one another amid a tangle of clothes. Bullet holes in the skulls and ligatures around the wrists show that these were violent deaths.

Legacy of war

In fact investigators from the UN Office on Missing Persons and Forensics had a good idea of what happened to these people even before they found them.

In July 1998 they believe guerrillas from the Kosovo Liberation Army abducted Serbs in the Orahovac area of Kosovo and took them to their headquarters in Malisevo with the intention of swapping them for ethnic Albanian prisoners held by the Serbian security forces.

But the deal never happened. Instead the Serbs were murdered and buried in two locations - 13 in Malisevo and 24 near the town of Klina.

In 1998 Kosovo was controlled by Serbia, though most of its people were not Serbs, but ethnic Albanians.

Guerrillas from the Kosovo Liberation Army were embarking on a campaign of violent resistance that, with Nato's help, drove Serbian security forces out of the province. Most of the KLA's targets were military, but some were civilian.

Seven-year search

For Olgica Bozanic, a Kosovo Serb now living in Belgrade, her search is over. The bodies of her two brothers and a cousin are almost certainly among the dead. DNA tests are expected to confirm it soon.

I had interviewed Olgica a few months ago when she was still looking for them. I did not expect to hear her family's name again so soon.

I felt my search had ended, and I no longer had a reason to live Olgica Bozanic

"On 18 July 1998 my brothers were taken by the Albanians - by members of the KLA and the neighbours we grew up with," she says.

"I spent seven years searching for them and for the truth about what happened to them."

"I had hoped that the KLA were keeping my family alive for their political goals, for negotiations - and to show the world that the KLA were not criminals, but the liberators of Kosovo, which they called themselves."

Olgica visited the exhumation near Klina a couple of weeks ago.

"When I reached the cave I felt that my search had ended, and that I no longer had a reason to live", she said.

"I wanted to be with them there, to hold them, but I couldn't. I screamed at the bodies as if they could hear me. I was clawing at the ground."

"I'll never forget that feeling."

Old wounds

Some within the United Nations Mission which runs Kosovo fear that the discovery of mass graves like these is actually a bad thing, that it reopens wounds at a time when starting talks on the final status of the province should be the top priority.

Jose Pablo Barajbar: Coming to terms with the past is crucial

But the head of the Office on Missing Persons and Forensics Jose Pablo Barajbar disagrees. He believes that until the missing on both sides are accounted for, Kosovo has little chance of moving on.

"People have to come to terms with the past to deal with the future", he says, "so we have to determine the whereabouts of these people, to know what happened to these people, and to know that there are not more places where people are hidden."

For the relatives of the people whose bodies have been found recently this is the end of an agonising seven-year wait. But there are more than 2,500 people still unaccounted for from the Kosovo war, most of them ethnic Albanians, but several hundred non-Albanians as well.

Long, slow process

Finding the missing is one thing, but knowing who they are is another.

At a UN morgue in central Kosovo lie the remains of 700 people - Albanian, Serb and others - all awaiting positive identification.

They may have been divided in life, but in death they lie together. Some of them have been here for as long as three years.

In a matter of days Belgrade is expected to hand over more bodies of ethnic Albanians which were hidden in Serbia proper.

It is a slow, convoluted and political process returning Kosovo's missing to their families - and finally laying them to rest.

The empty coffins lie in a pile at the rear of the morgue, waiting.