KOSOVO: Ten Years On, Forensics Continues to ID Missing

PRISTINA, Nov 19, 2009 (IPS) - Pictures of missing people have been hanging for years next to the gate to the fence surrounding Kosovo’s parliament. Some of them have been there for so long that the features of the faces can hardly be seen anymore - a good example of how slow and painful the process of discovering the fate of the missing is.

Ten years after the end of the war here there are still more than 1,000 people from Kosovo in the list of missing persons kept by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). But, despite limited capacity and infrastructure, people at the department of forensic investigations in Pristina keep searching for the missing.

In the forensic lab, Director Arsim Gerxhaliu, points with a small plastic bar at the bullet holes on the back of the skull of two recently recovered skeletons.

"Even in cases of a point blank execution so clear like this one we do not make conclusions," he says, bending over the remains to explain how research into new findings takes place in order to gather as much evidence as possible in order to help accurately identify who this person has been. "Our job finishes with suggesting an accusation to judicial authorities," he adds.

War in Kosovo between Albanian guerrillas and Serbian security forces lasted through 1998, and up to the spring of 1999 when the former Yugoslav Republic security forces withdrew from the region as a result of a three months long NATO bombing campaign against Serbia. Today it is estimated that between 12,000 and 13,000 people fell victims to the hostilities during that time.

Some people initially considered missing were identified and found to be alive immediately after the war when a huge wave of refugees returned as the region moved towards post war normalcy.

"There were still 5,600 Albanians, Serbs and others declared missing in Kosovo when the forensic department was established in 2002," forensic anthropologist Alan Robinson told IPS. "Today we are still counting 1,885 unaccounted persons in the ICRC’s list."

"Searching for missing people after such a long time is a difficult task. It is difficult to find valid information or recall peoples’ memories. There are cases of fearful informants and witnesses or families who are not willing to provide information fearing for their well being."

According to Robinson one of the toughest tasks investigators face is to identify the site of a grave, "a purely forensic approach would not get us far, so we have developed an outreach branch."

Valuable information is available everywhere he says, "Civil society might have info which they don’t consider relevant. Some other things are derived through ICRC. Important meetings between the Pristina and Belgrade committees responsible for missing persons take place two or three times per year during which essential information sometimes is exchanged. Then there are less orthodox ways, sometimes we are approached confidentially by someone who has been present in an incident and wants to talk."

Progress is slow but steady. There have been 120 field operations this year. The 68 completed exhumations resulted in recovery of 78 remains of individuals - some of which have already been identified.

Following exhumation experts create the biological profile of a person that concentrates information about the sex and age plus any skeletal fractures or dental details which would assist in identification. Still, identifying remains depends on a DNA examination comparing blood samples from possible relatives with DNA extracted from the remains of a body.

The infrastructure for such examination is unavailable in Kosovo thus samples are sent to the city of Tuzla in Bosnia, where a specialised lab has been developed to help the country deal with the massive numbers of unknown persons after the war there.

Some bodies were re-buried during the war - most often in an attempt of perpetrators to hide their crimes. Despite no strong scenarios of mass executions and mass graves in Kosovo some high profile cases have illustrated the virulence of this short-term conflict.

The most known case is the mass grave of Batajnica, just outside Belgrade, in which many bodies from Kosovo where placed in an attempt by Serbian security forces to cover up war crimes during their withdrawal.

"Attempts to remove war crime evidence intensified during the vacuum between the end of NATO’s operations on Jun. 10, 1999 and the complete removal of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia forces eleven days later… which signalled the cessation of hostilities," says Gerxhaliu. Eight hundred bodies out of the 900 found in Batajnica have been recovered and returned to Kosovo so far.

The date of the Yugoslav withdrawal is set as a timeline for the characterisation of an incident as a war crime. "Any case defined to have happened before Jun. 22, 1999 is possibly a war crime," according to Gerxhaliu. "In that case responsibility is offered to a special war crime unit run by the European Union Rule of Law Mission (EULEX)."

EULEX is the largest European mission ever. It arrived in Kosovo after the declaration of independence in February 2008 with a mandate to assist the newborn state in legal and judicial capacity building. Since then the forensic department has been integrated into the mission.

Experts from the department were involved in the ‘Yellow House’ investigation that came to light when former High Prosecutor of the International Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia Carla Del Ponte’s book was released in April 2008. It included allegations concerning the possible trafficking by Kosovo Albanian paramilitaries of 400 prisoners’ organs from a mysterious yellow house near the Albanian town of Burrel. The fate of those missing people remains still unknown.

Investigative efforts on missing persons conclude when families are contacted and provided with all information regarding the cause, place, and time of death of relatives. "It is a tough thing and it is always done in person. People need to know these things," says Kristiina Herodes, press officer with EULEX. "Cases close with the finalisation of a case’s report, publishing a death certificate, handing over the remains to relatives and removing a person from ICRC’s list."

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