Kosovo-Serbia Declaration on Missing Persons Remains Unimplemented

Discussion event on Friday to mark Kosovo’s National Day on Missing Persons. Photo: BIRN.

The head of the Kosovo government’s Missing Persons Commission, Andin Hoti, said on Friday that he has received no response so far to his letters to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell expressing concern that a declaration made by Kosovo and Serbia last year, which was aimed at intensifying the search for the remaining wartime missing persons, isn’t being implemented yet.

Hoti, whose father Ukshin has been missing since the war, also claimed that he did not receive a response to a letter he sent to the Serbian authorities last June about opening up the archives of the Yugoslav Army’s 37th Yugoslav Army Motorised Brigade, which operated in Kosovo’s Drenica region and has been accused of involvement in war crimes.

He said he sent the letter within the framework of the declaration on missing persons made by Kosovo and Serbia as part of the Ohrid deal on normalisation of relations in April last year. The declaration was endorsed by Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.

“On June 1 [2023], I sent a letter to Vucic… for the implementation of the agreement… requesting the opening of the archives of the 37th Brigade from Drenica,” Hoti said.

The declaration committed Kosovo and Serbia to make “additional joint efforts” to deal with the missing persons issue, according to a statement by Borrell last May.

EU spokesperson Peter Stano confirmed to BIRN that the implementation of the declaration on missing persons has not started yet.

Stano insisted however that “it is an important document in that it declares the commitment of the parties not to politicise the issue of missing persons and to advance their cooperation including the exchange of information, the joint identification of burial sites and the effective follow-up of excavations”.

Hoti and Stano made their comments at a roundtable discussion held to mark Kosovo’s National Day on Missing Persons, organised by the Kosovo Ombudsperson in Pristina.

Hoti told the discussion that in 2023, there were exhumations in 15 locations and a total of 20 missing persons’ remains were found. Nine missing persons’ remains were sent to their families, he added.

“Two thousand eight hundred locations have been exhumed in total [since the end of the war in 1999],” Hoti added.

Bajram Cerkini, the director of the Resource Centre for Missing Persons, whose son is among the wartime disappeared, urged the authorities to take more concrete steps to resolve the issue.

Cerkini said that an area “where I believe there are eight people [buried], including my son, has not been exhumed yet”.