Four months after the end of the Kosovo war, one issue remains tragically unresolved–the fate of 7,000 missing people. In the weeks after NATO’s victory, mass graves were found and bodies of murdered Kosovar Albanians identified. But the grisly audit of war is far from complete. And though the international community has condemned the Serb massacres, there has been almost a total silence on another Serb tactic: During the 78-day war, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Kosovar men were taken prisoner and transported to Serbia. They languish there still. While almost every town and village in Kosovo suffered losses in the war, none was hit harder than Djakovica, a former stronghold of the KLA. According to reports compiled by KLA officials and the International Committee of the Red Cross, about 1,105 men and teenage boys from Djakovica remain unaccounted for. Almost certainly, most of them are dead; but at least 250 remain in Serb prisons. Their story reveals a troubling gap in the arrangements designed to bring peace and reconciliation to the Balkans.
Why was Djakovica singled out for such brutality? After the NATO bombing began, the town’s strategic location near Kosovo’s southern border made it ripe for the “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians. KLA units hiding in the hills conducted repeated hit-and-run attacks on the Serbs, whose forces responded with brutal retaliation against civilians. On April 27, after the ambush killing of a hated Serb police captain near Djakovica by KLA guerrillas, Serbs allegedly massacred 500 men and boys. On May 7, KLA units swept down from the mountains and attacked Serb troops in the old market neighborhood of Djakovica. During the next four days, as shooting raged in the streets, Serbs moved systematically through the city of 80,000, arresting hundreds of men, according to eyewitnesses–and executing untold numbers of them.
The family of Aferdita Cavdarbasha, 33, was caught unawares when the shooting erupted outside their tidy compound on Shefki Shasivari Street on May 7. Cavdarbasha, an English teacher, made a dash to a safer section of town with a dozen members of her family. One kilometer from their home, however, Cavdarbasha’s brothers–pharmacists Burhim Zhubi, 40, and Mirgjin Zhubi, 30–were arrested along with their father and taken to police headquarters. The elder Zhubi was sent home a week later. The brothers never returned.
Last August, leafing through an Albanian-language newspaper, Cavdarbasha spotted her brothers’ names on a list of 1,925 men who had been arrested in Kosovo and transferred to a dozen prisons inside Serbia. After months of pressure by human-rights groups, the Yugoslav Ministry of Justice had provided the list to the Red Cross. Most men are being held on “security”-related charges–and some 600, according to Red Cross monitors, have already been put on trial for alleged complicity with the KLA before and during the war. Cavdarbasha insists that her brothers were “pharmacists, not fighters,” and takes what solace she can from reports by Red Cross officials who visited the jails that the prisoners are in good condition. “All the time I tell my mother, ‘We were fools to have stayed here. We should have left for Albania’,” Cavdarbasha says. “Now we wait and pray to God that soon they will come home.”
The family could have a long wait. Neither the June agreement between NATO and Yugoslav forces nor the United Nations Security Council resolution that mandates an international presence in Kosovo addressed the issue of prisoners. That, says Christophe Beney, the ICRC’s chief of mission in Pristina, the Kosovo capital, was “a terrible oversight.” And Bernard Kouchner, chief of the U.N. Civilian Mission in Kosovo, has been unwilling to negotiate on any issues at all with Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, having stated that he won’t do business with an indicted war criminal. With diplomatic efforts at a standstill, it has been left to human-rights groups and the European Union to issue public demands for the release of all Kosovar political prisoners in Serb jails. That approach may be bearing some fruit: a group of 54 were released to the Red Cross last week. But observers believe that the bulk of the prisoners are being held as bargaining chips to wrest future concessions from Kosovo’s administrators–including an accounting of 300 Kosovar Serbs missing since the NATO bombing.
The only recourse left to Kosovars is weekly protests in Djakovica and Pristina. On a sultry Friday afternoon in late September, a procession of 1,000 marched past the rubble of central Djakovica bearing snapshots of their missing and imprisoned relatives. MSS.[sic] ALBRIGHT, WE COUNT ON YOUR HELP, read one sign. Lulieta Sharani carried a poster showing photos of her six missing family members. The Serbs are holding them, she insisted, unaccounted for, in jail. “I see my sons’ pictures and I hear them saying, ‘Mom, why didn’t you protect us?’ " The question now is whether anyone will help liberate them.
