However, few of them seem to have big expectations, two decades after losing their loved ones.

Silvana Markovic, whose husband was abducted on June 19, 1999 in the Kosovo town of Gracanica, said Thaci and his allies “should finally start answering for the crimes committed against the Serbs”.

“There is still some suspicion, like last time, that it [trials] will start and then stop. We are surprised [by news of the charges], so there is some hope in God; I guess everyone who is responsible for the crimes will be punished,” Markovic told BIRN.

She said her husband, Goran, had been preparing to leave Kosovo but was meantime kidnapped along with two others.

At the same time, in June 1999, after the war in Kosovo was effectively over and international peacekeeping forces had moved in, Natasa Scepanovic saw her parents alive for the last time. She received the remains of her father in 2003. Her mother is still listed as missing.

Scepanovic, as president of a survivors’ group, the Victims of Kosmet Association in Belgrade, says the charges offer “a small glimmer of hope” for her and other Serbian victims and their families.

“We have hope that some kind of justice will be reached and that those who are guilty for the crimes that happened in Kosovo will be punished. We expect these indictments to get their court epilogue … There is a lot of evidence, a lot of material,” she said. “This should have happened earlier,” she added.

Funeral procession for the 14 Serbs massacred in Gracka e Vjeter/Staro Gracko in July 1999. PHOTO: EPA/LOUISA GOULIAMAKI.

A press release from Wednesday from the Hague-based Specialist Prosecutor’s Office, SPO, said it had filed a ten-count indictment with the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, KSC, against Thaci, another politician, Kadri Veseli, and others for a range of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture.

The press release did not give any more details about the time range of the alleged crimes or about the places where they are alleged to have happened.

As BIRN has reported, when dealing with Kosovo Albanian war crime allegations before, the Hague war-crimes tribunal, the ICTY, opted to charge former KLA members mostly for isolated crimes, focusing on certain events and then trying to prove the connections between the indicted and the specific crime.

In contrast to that, this time the prosecutor’s team at the Specialist Court, also in the Hague, is focusing on large-scale campaigns of murder and persecution and trying to prove that, as a KLA leader, Thaci was responsible both for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Crimes against humanity refer to crimes committed in the context of widespread or systematic attacks against civilians or identifiable parts of the civilian population, and can be committed in peace time, not just during conflicts, like war crimes.

One the most well-known crimes involving Serbs that was committed after the Kosovo war occurred on July 23, 1999, in the village of Staro Gracko/Gracka e Vjeter, 20 kilometres from the capital, Pristina, where 14 people were killed while out in a field harvesting their wheat.

As BIRN reported, the massacre was the subject of criminal proceedings but without any conclusion. Police from the UN Kosovo mission, UNMIK, arrested an ethnic Albanian called Mazllum Bytyqi in 2007 in relation to the crime, but he was released two months later due to a lack of evidence.

In 2010, UN prosecutors handed the case file to the EU’s rule-of-law mission, EULEX. In 2017, the case was closed.

The Specialist Chambers confirmed for BIRN in July last year that the case lay within its jurisdiction.

The wife of one victim, Miodrag Tepsic, Slavica Tepsic, said the truth should have come out before. “After these 20 years, to be honest, I don’t have many expectations,” Tepsic told BIRN.

Some family members and associations that represent Serbian victims from Kosovo have declined to comment on the news “until we see what will happen”.

A Kosovo Serb boy from Orahovac watches the distribution of humanitarian aid on Friday, 29 October 1999. Photo: EPA PHOTO/EPA/NENAD KOJADINOVIC/as/kr

A milestone in the long process of establishing the truth about crimes committed by the KLA in the late-1990s was a report released in 2010 by the Council of Europe rapporteur Dick Marty. This accused former KLA leaders of organ trafficking, among other grave crimes.

The claims made in that report were followed up by a European Union special investigative task force. The task force’s subsequent report, which alleged that KLA chiefs had committed serious crimes, led to the establishment of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers.

Natasa Kandic, founder of the Humanitarian Law Centre, a Belgrade-based NGO that deals with war crimes, said she expected the indictment to be upheld against the former high representatives of the KLA.

According to Fonet news agency, she also said the public in Serbia must be prepared for the fact that the trials will not only focus on KLA organ trafficking but also on crimes committed against Albanians – and then on crimes against Serbs.