Kosovo begins excavations at newly discovered mass graves tied to 1998–99 war missing, as information on burial sites has fallen sharply despite a 2023 pledge by Kosovo and Serbia to cooperate in locating the missing.
It is difficult terrain to walk through, covered in dense forest. Until forensic teams began excavating days ago, this part of Kalluder e Vogel village in Zubin Potok, inhabited by a few Serbs in Kosovo’s still-troubled north, was a peaceful patch of land.
The excavations have unsettled even more those waiting to learn the fate of their missing relatives. Fidaim Rrecaj is one of them.
Rrecaj remembers April 17, 1999, when his father, Idriz, a political and human rights activist then 54, was taken from the village of Brobaniq, where he was sheltering, to an unknown destination, along with more than 20 other men and boys, most of them from the Drenica region. They never came back. They were last seen on April 19.
“I have heard about many potential places, including this one in Kalluder village,” he said. “At the beginning, every place in this area seemed to me like a potential grave. Then I lost hope,” Rrecaj added.
Persecution of informants
The remains of 23 people suspected of belonging to a group missing people from cities of Mitrovica and Skenderaj have already been found at the site. Bullets were also discovered around the site, indicating that the victims may have been executed there.
“I hope we can close this painful chapter. No matter how much time has passed, it always keeps the war and the pain fresh,” Rrecaj said.
Kosovo police have arrested five men from the local area on suspicion of war crimes linked to the mass grave, one of whom was a former active member of the then-Yugoslav Army.
Caretaker Prime Minister Albin Kurti said the discovered remains most likely belong to “23 Albanians who had been violently abducted and executed” in the spring of 1999 in Kosovo. Rrecaj is again hoping that his father’s remains will be among those found.
But Kushtrim Gara, head of Kosovo’s Missing Persons Unit, says it cannot be determined whether the remains belong to missing persons or the 23 people kidnapped in April 1999 until examinations and DNA analyses are completed.
“The bodies of victims were often buried, exhumed, and reburied at different locations. In many cases, the remains of the same victims have been found at different sites,” Gara said.
A day after excavations started, Serbian authorities arrested a 46-year-old Kosovo Serb on suspicion of “espionage,” for providing information about mass grave in the village of Kalluder e Vogel.
“This discourages anyone who might have information about missing persons,” says Natsa Bozilovic, program coordinator at the Pristina-based NGO Missing Persons Resource Center.
The 1998–99 Kosovo war killed more than 13,270 people, mostly ethnic Albanians, and displaced over one million. Nearly three decades later, more than 1,550 remain missing, while this site was among the largest locations where human remains were discovered in the past decade.
Kosovo declared independence in 2008 with Western backing, but Serbia still refuses to recognise it, stalling more than a decade of EU-mediated efforts to normalise relations.
Under the EU-facilitated dialogue, Serbia and Kosovo adopted a Declaration on Missing Persons in May 2023, committing to clarify the fate of those still missing, and formed a Joint Commission on Missing Persons in January 2026. Following the Joint Commission, technical working groups still need to be established to address the issues to be decided in Brussels. However, since the Joint Commission became operational in January, only one meeting has been held, focusing on the parties’ mutual requests: access to war archives and investigations into the post-war missing. But so far there is no agenda for this process nor any set timeframe for implementing the declaration. Gara said that the other issues have not yet been defined and that, in future discussions, the obligations of both sides will be clarified. Under the Law on Classified Information, the President of Serbia can revoke the secrecy classification of specific documents, while Kosovo has only intensified efforts to address crimes committed during and after the war, as well as cases of forced disappearance.
Serbia’s refusal to grant access to wartime records has hindered the search for missing people, as Serbian forces moved victims from mass graves to conceal evidence of war crimes.
Meanwhile, Kosovo is under an obligation to conduct more intensive investigations.
Between 2001 and 2002, the remains of 744 victims were found in nine burial sites near a military training ground in Batajnica, in the outskirts of Belgrade.
Gara said that the Kosovo Commission’s priority is to return to Batajnica following new information obtained from the archives of several countries. “We have concluded that Batajnica is likely to contain the remains of 58 additional victims of the Kosovo war,” Gara said.
Commitment on paper
Kosovo has requested access to classified wartime military documents belonging to the 37th Motorised Brigade, as well as other information relevant to the search.
“This brigade was involved in many crimes committed in Drenica and northern Kosovo, and the remains of many victims were found buried in Rudnica, near Raska, where this brigade had its base,” Gara said.
The 37th Motorised Brigade also operated in the Zubin Potok region, where the recent mass grave was discovered. A few days after excavations began in Kalluder e Vogel, a monument was erected in the Serbian city of Raska honouring the 37th Motorised Brigade, which was commanded by Ljubisa Diković in 1999.
The office of Serbia’s chief negotiator, Petar Petković, and the head of the Serbian Government’s Commission on Missing Persons, Liljana Krstic, declined to comment for this article for the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Under the Brussels Declaration, Kosovo is obliged to investigate crimes committed after the official end of the war when members of the Serb minority were targeted in revenge attacks. This issue yielded very few results under both the UN mission (UNMIK) and the EU mission (EULEX).
In recent years, the Transitional Justice Strategy has focused heavily on crimes committed by Serbian forces and the judicial system has pursued trials in absentia against Serbs involved in war crimes. However, statistics indicate that there have been few cases concerning crimes committed against minority communities. This reality will made it more difficult for Kosovo to fulfil its obligations under the Declaration.
“The excavation of 2,720 locations so far is a testament to our dedication. Given Kosovo’s surface area, this amounts to an excavation, on average, every four kilometres,” Gara said.
The lack of investigations and prosecutions for post-war killings could pressure Kosovo and give Serbia grounds to resist granting archive access. The Transitional Justice Strategy is expected to establish a legal framework for recognizing and providing reparations to victims, particularly those affected after June 20, 1999.
In recent years, due to the lack of credible information, the overall number of newly discovered burial sites of missing people has dropped sharply.
Kosovo authorities are hunting for former police and army personnel living in Kosovo in an effort to obtain more information about potential burial sites of victims.
According to the Pristina-based Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo, around 1,200 ethnic Albanians, 400 Serbs and dozens of Roma remain missing, most minorities having disappeared after the war ended in June 1999.
“The EU strongly encourages the parties to continue implementing the declaration and to work on this humanitarian issue,” the EU Special Representative for the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue, Peter Sørensen, told HB in a written response.
Apart from setting integration-related conditions, the EU has created no mechanism to ensure implementation of these obligations.
More than 400 unidentified human remains from the 1998–99 Kosovo war are held at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Pristina, with DNA profiles unmatched to families’ reference samples.
The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), which pioneered DNA-based identification of war victims’ remains, has called for identifications made without DNA between 1999 and 2002 to be revisited. “Additional reference samples can help identify potential misidentifications, particularly where non-DNA methods were used,” ICMP said.
Authorities in Kosovo have not made public plans to address the misidentifications or secure families’ cooperation in this painful, complex process. “We are carefully addressing the issue of unidentified remains in the Pristina morgue,” says Gara.
Rrecaj’s hope for justice has evaporated. “Families want to have at least a grave.”