With his head lowered, dressed in work clothes, Flurim Hajdari walks toward the six graves of his brothers and father. The majority of his family was killed during the massacre of March 26, 1999, in the small village of Krusha in Prizren.
Every day, as he travels from work to home, his eyes linger on the headstones placed over the graves. But, six graves hold only five names. One remains dry, as Flurim’s brother Veseli is still missing.
“I pass by here ten times a day, ten times a day, and my head is turned this way. I have all my relatives here,” he says for Radio Free Europe.
These visits fill him with memories, sadness, and anger.
Around nine years ago, Flurim, also dressed in work clothes as a tile setter, rushed toward these graves after receiving a phone call.
“A friend called me and said they were removing my brothers,” Flurim recalls the day he learned that the bodies of his three older brothers were being exhumed by European Union Rule of Law Mission (EULEX) officials.
“When I arrived, they wouldn’t let me approach to see what was happening. The excavator had entered among the graves, and they were just opening holes. No one told me what was happening,” he adds.
So, what was happening?
On August 25, 2015 – five days before International Day for the Victims of Enforced Disappearances – EULEX representatives exhumed the bodies of Flurim’s three brothers – Nazim, Rasim, and Selajdin Hajdari – under the pretext of verifying some information.
The remains that had previously been in those graves were taken and sent to Pristina for further testing. A few months later, Flurim was told that, in fact, the remains in those graves belonged to seven other people, also missing from the Krusha massacre.
How did this happen?
- March 26, 1999: Two days after NATO bombings began, five brothers – ranging in age from 12 to 33 – and their 64-year-old father were killed in the Krusha massacre.
- March 26, 2007: The bodies of Nazim and Rasim Hajdari were handed over to the family and buried in the small village cemetery. The authorities had mistakenly informed the family the previous night that the bodies belonged to Nazim and Selajdin.
- March 26, 2009: Selajdin’s body was handed over to the family, identified through DNA analysis.
- August 25, 2015: The bodies of the three brothers were exhumed. The family was told that, previously, DNA tests had not been conducted on all the remains.
- March 26, 2016: The remains of the three brothers and seven others, previously thought to be identified, were reburied.
“I don’t know how it happened that three people turned into seven others. I don’t know. I no longer have any reason to trust them. This isn’t the first time. They’ve disappointed us. They’ve lied to us. These things have tired us the most,” says Flurim.
Aside from over 13,000 people killed, the war in Kosovo in 1998/99 left a legacy of many missing persons. Over the years, dozens of mass graves have been identified in Kosovo and Serbia. Currently, families in Kosovo are still searching for 1,612 missing individuals, according to data from the Red Cross.
Immediately after the war in Kosovo, responsibility for searching and identifying the remains of missing persons was with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), followed by EULEX and national authorities in Kosovo, such as the Institute of Forensic Medicine.
Earlier, EULEX stated to BIRN that around five percent of missing persons’ remains were misidentified.
When asked by REL, the mission did not provide a figure for how many such cases have been registered, but said they were a small percentage of the “over 2,000 traditional identifications exhumed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the years 1999-2000.”
Traditional identification refers to the case when family members identify the remains through facial features or the clothes the person wore.
EULEX emphasizes that many of the cases identified this way turned out to be correct, even after DNA tests.
However, using this method of identification instead of more scientific methods, like DNA analysis, has had long-term consequences for Kosovo, says Mathew Holliday, program director of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) for Europe.
