Kosovo is navigating the complex process of moving from a divided memorialization of the past toward a dialogue that transcends simplistic narratives.
Not far from Agron Limani's house in the village of Krusha e Vogel/Velika Krusa, near Prizren, stands a memorial where half of the graves remain empty.
He lost his father, brother, and two cousins in the massacre there on March 26, 1999, when Serbian forces killed 116 civilians. His brother’s remains were later found, but his father and the others are still missing. Engaged for years with the families of the missing, Limani has also pushed for a small plaque to be placed in front of the Kosovo Assembly to commemorates more than 1,500 people who remain missing from the 1998–99 war in Kosovo.
“As missing, they are on one list, part of only one truth,” Limani said.
Like him in Shtrpce, Jasmina Jovanovic’s family also keeps an empty grave for her father, Shaun, who went missing in September 1999, three months after the war officially ended. But his name is inscribed dozens of kilometers away, on an obelisk for missing persons in Gracanica.
“The narrative that supports division is favored, and I fear it will only deepen,” Jovanovic said.
Yet the search for missing persons remains one of the few issues capable of bridging ethnic divides, as families across communities share the same unresolved grief. Personal stories of war from Albanians and Serbs offer nuanced human perspectives, yet listening to these narratives alone exposes a reality insufficient to heal trauma, preserve history, or foster the dialogue needed to lay down the burden of the past.
Natasa Bozilovic, deputy head of the Missing Persons Resource Center, an NGO that brings together families of missing persons from all ethnic backgrounds in Kosovo, said that it is possible to moving beyond current narratives.
“If commemorations are built around voices of victims’s families, they can become places that bring people together,” she said.
“Acts of joint remembrance can slowly destroy the walls that divide,” Bozilovic added.
However across Kosovo, Albanians and Serbs hold on to collective memories of the war that exclude the other.
In Osojan/ Osojane, a Serb-inhabited village in Kosovo’s western municipality of Istog, the memorial to those killed during and after the war stands near the church some of whom are not from the village but from surrounding areas. Serbs in this area see themselves as having also paid a price, a reality they believe the other side must acknowledge. Priest Dalibor Kojic explained that the site was selected as “the most appropriate place of remembrance for those who know and feel it.” At the same time, he admitted that he could not articulate how the persistent gap in divided remembrance could be overcome.
The 78-day NATO air campaign in 1999 is also etched into this culture of division. Albanians view it as an act of salvation, while Serbs see it as an act of aggression.
In 2021, after civil society criticism, Podujeva’s municipality revised a memorial to 44 bus passengers killed in the May 1, 1999, NATO airstrike, restoring 13 previously omitted Serb victims’ names. This memorial is one of the few that commemorates victims from both sides. Also in most museums, artifacts collected over the past four decades overlook the suffering of ethnic minorities, with exceptions mostly in exhibitions led by civil society groups.
Roots of discord
These rifts are firmly entrenched in over thirty years of hostility between Albanians and Serbs.
The 1989 revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy as a Yugoslav province marked a pivotal turning point that catalyzed political resistance, exacerbated interethnic tensions, and laid the foundations for the armed conflict of the 1990s. In the subsequent decade, Slobodan Milosevic’s regime further entrenched repression and launched Kosovo’s descent into conflict and the KLA's appearance on the scene.
It culminated in the Kosovo 1998-99 war with NATO air strikes launched in March 1999 to halt atrocities and the campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by Serbian forces against Kosovo Albanian civilians during their counter-insurgency war against the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
The Kosovo war resulted in the deaths of more than 13,500 people.
The legacy of war in Kosovo, as in other states of the former Yugoslavia, continues to shape contested practices of memorialization and historical narration. More than two and half decades after the conflict, a fragmented and polarized culture of remembrance endures, reflecting competing ethno-political perspectives.
Initiatives aimed at transcending reductionist narratives and cultivating a more nuanced, inclusive understanding of the past have thus far achieved limited success. Almost all public spaces are dominated by memorials dedicated to the past of a single ethnicity, with only a few remaining World War II monuments, commemorating the shared fight of Yugoslavia’s different ethnic groups standing as exceptions.
Some war memorials in Kosovo are characterized by hateful language and inaccurate data, reflecting predominantly mono-national perspectives on the events they commemorate, while a few acknowledge the suffering of other ethnic communities. The processes of establishing and acknowledging the truth remain largely untested, reflecting persistent challenges in confronting historical realities.
Striving for a shift
By combining memory and dialogue, scholars and peacebuilders believe it enables opposing ethnic groups to confront the past and pursue reconciliation with empathy and respect.
Aleksandar Vojvoda from Pro Peace, in Belgrade, an international organisation, that works on conflict transformation pointed out that remembrance remains fragmented and shaped by ethnonational narratives. “It prioritizes victimhood and silences inconvenient facts,” he said.
This selective focus, Vojvoda said, “risks deepening ethnic divides” rather than commitment to justice and reconciliation.
“Fostering inclusive history must begin with safe spaces for multi-perspective dialogue, shifting from remembering against others to remembering with others,” he said.
Ethnic divides hinder dialogue, while intra-community fractures demand broader moral perspectives still constrained by past conflicts.
Jasna Dragovic-Soso, visiting professor at LSE’s Research Unit for Southeastern Europe, noted that while interpretations of history, especially war causes, inevitably diverge, some basic facts must still be agreed upon.
“Shared facts do not mean shared truths, but they are a basis for dialogue. This also implies agreeing on what is false, and this is perhaps even more difficult,” she said.
In this process, the testimonies of victims and witnesses are crucial for validating facts, deepening historical understanding, and challenging homogenizing, essentialist views of other ethnic groups.
Dragovic Soso said that there needs to be a process that allows for the ‘rehumanization’ of the ‘other’. “It also means accepting some silences as part of the process, if certain subjects are still too difficult and painful to broach, and focusing instead on areas that are easier to agree on.” Nora Ahmetaj, a transitional justice researcher, argued that politics and nationalist indoctrination keep Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo believing narratives that serve them .“Each sees themselves as the war’s greatest victim,” Ahmetaj said.
“To overcome the burden of the past, Kosovo needs a shared culture of memory built on critical reflection on commemorations, and a more inclusive, evidence-based history curriculum,” she added.
Breaking rigid narratives and fostering intercultural dialogue hinges on political will, particularly the willingness to confront past wrongs.
“All sides can move beyond simplistic narratives that divide through inclusive processes that center both the memory of the victims and emphasize historical accountability,” Vojvoda said.
Kosovo will continue to be faced with a choice: whether to continue reproducing fragmented memorials or to build a culture of remembrance rooted in empathy, inclusion and truth. The stories gathered here are only the beginning of a broader exploration of how memory can be reshaped. In the coming months, further articles in this series will examine the policies, practices and social forces that can move memorialization beyond ritual toward genuine reflection and change.