Amnesty: Serbia, Kosovo to conduct investigation on missing

NEW YORK - On the International Day of the Disappeared, August 30, Amnesty International urges authorities in Serbia and Kosovo to carry out prompt, independent, effective and impartial investigations against those suspected of enforced disappearances and abductions committed before, during and after the international armed conflict in Kosovo in 1999.

U.S.-based international human rights organisation Amnesty International said in its report that 15 years after the end of the armed conflict, around 1,700 people are still missing.

Elsewhere in the region, 7,800 remain missing in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and 2,200 in Croatia.

Relatives across the region are still waiting for the bodies of their missing family members to be found.

Even where bodies have been found and returned to their families for burial, few of those responsible for these enforced disappearances and abductions have been brought to justice.

The recovery of bodies generally remains painfully slow, although there are some signs of progress.

In Serbia, excavations continue at Raska, where the bodies of 47 Kosovo Albanians, transported from Kosovo in 1999, have already been found.

But more than 12 years after the bodies of more than 900 other Kosovo Albanians were exhumed at other sites in Serbia, no-one has been brought to justice, Amnesty International says in the report.

A special court has been announced for Kosovo, to prosecute former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) alleged by a Special Investigative Task Force to be responsible for the abduction of Serbs, Roma and Kosovo Albanians, and their transfer to Albania, where they are believed to have been killed.

Yet the UN Interim...