At the end of the Kosovo war in June 1999, 5,206 people were reported missing by their families. The vast majority were ethnic Albanian civilians killed by Serbian soldiers, police and paramilitaries during the war. Over the next seven years the bodies of around two and a half thousand people have been found and identified. Some were buried in mass graves in Kosovo, some were transported to mass graves near the village of Batajnica, just outside Belgrade, where they were discovered after the...
more »At the end of the Kosovo war in June 1999, 5,206 people were reported missing by their families. The vast majority were ethnic Albanian civilians killed by Serbian soldiers, police and paramilitaries during the war. Over the next seven years the bodies of around two and a half thousand people have been found and identified. Some were buried in mass graves in Kosovo, some were transported to mass graves near the village of Batajnica, just outside Belgrade, where they were discovered after the fall of Milosevic in 2000, others were found in reservoirs and rivers where they had been dumped along with the freezer trucks that had transported them from the massacre sites in Kosovo.
In recent years, the families of the dead have hung portraits of their loved ones on the perimeter fence of the parliament building in Pristina, where, open to the elements, they have begun to fade and slowly decompose. The photographs serve as a memorial to the dead and as a reminder that yet more remain unfound. Of the two thousand or so people who remain missing, around 70% are ethnic Albanians, the other 30% are mainly ethnic Serbs, almost certainly killed in revenge attacks after the war.
Kosovo is set to become Europe's newest country, it will also be it's poorest.
Even though this province of Serbia has been controlled and governed by the United Nations for the past eight years, basic services such as electricity, water and garbage collection are all unstable and sporadic. Corruption at all levels is rife, and the damage caused by the war is still very much evident in the landscape.
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