Fate of 1,655 people in Kosovo still unresolved

BELGRADE - The fate of 1,655 people gone missing in Kosovo during the clashes in 1998 and 1999 remains unresolved, the Working Group in charge of missing persons stated at its 38th meeting on Tuesday.

In the course of ten years of its existence, the Working Group in charge of cases of persons gone missing in Kosovo managed to reduce the number of unsolved cases from 3,200 to 1,655, Chair of the Working Group Lina Milner said.

She noted that the key condition for progress in solving the fate of the missing is embodied in a continuous and constructive dialogue based on humanitarian grounds, without political rhetoric from Belgrade and Pristina.

Milner noted that 68 cases of missing persons have been solved this year and added that considerable progress has been made, especially in terms of exhumation of the grave site at Rudnica near Raska (southern part of central Serbia), as well as victim identification and delivery of the remains to the families.

Chairman of the Serbian government's Commission on Missing Persons Veljko Odalovic said that the exhumations at several sites at Rudnica have been approved thanks to the satellite footage by NATO which 'someone found in the archives'.

He noted that remains of 53 bodies (of ethnic Albanians) were found at the site and were successfully identified and handed over to EULEX which delivered them to the victims' families in Kosovo.

Odalovic said that the examination of the site in Batajnica near Belgrade was restaged this year at the request by the Pristina Commission on Missing Persons, and announced that four more locations will be examined next year.

He noted that the list of missing persons includes over 500 Serbs and several dozen Roma, and...