Serbia: Exhuming the Skeletons of the Kosovo War

"In the coming weeks, following the joint hard work of the forensic team, more families will be able to close a very dark chapter in their lives," Fabien Bourdier of the International Committee of the Red Cross said in early December.

Bourdier was speaking at an old open-cast mine in the Serbian village of Kizevak, where human remains were found in November - almost certainly those of ethnic Albanians who were killed during the war in Kosovo in 1999.

The chief of Serbia's Commission for Missing Persons, Veljko Odalovic, said that the mass grave contained the remains of between 15 and 17 people.

The grave, which is not far from another mass burial site of Kosovo Albanians at a quarry in nearby Raska, was finally found after five years of unsuccessful searches.

As Krassimir Nikolov, exhumation coordinator at the European Union's rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, explained that the "breakthrough" came when aerial images of the open-cast mine from 1999, 2002 and 2020 were compared.

"After a thorough analysis, we identified the changes in the landscape and narrowed down the area of interest," Nikolov said.

The find at Kizevak is the latest in a series of mass graves that have been discovered in Serbia since the Kosovo war. Victims of massacres by Serbian forces were transported to Serbia and buried in clandestine graves as part of attempts to cover up the crimes.

Wartime disappearances become key political issue

The Serbian delegation to the Belgrade-Pristina talks in Brussels with EU special representative Miroslav Lajcak (left), the Kosovo delegation (right) and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borell (centre), July 2020. Photo: Instagram/buducnostsrbijeav.

Some 1,600 people who...