On April 27 each year, Kosovo commemorates its national day of missing persons, but families of the wartime disappeared and Kosovo Albanian and Serb officials always commemorate separately.

Jasmina Zivkovic, whose father Paun went missing in September 1999 in the eastern municiplaity of Ferizaj/Urosevac, marks the day with other relatives of Serbs who disappeared.

But the attendance of politicians at such commemorations often means that in a country where ethnic divisions remain strong and the legacy of war looms large, remembrance is highly politiciased.

“Unfortunately, politicians still use commemorative activities for their own agenda. Usually speeches that you hear from them are full of blame for the other side and the spreading of hate,” Zivkovic told BIRN.

“I think it represents the marginalisation and exclusion from the public domain of important initiatives dedicated to preserving the memory of all victims, regardless of ethnic or national origin,” she added.

For more than two decades, ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo have built separate memorials for their fallen heroes and civilian victims of the 1998-99 war and its aftermath.

War monuments and memorials have proliferated around Kosovo since the conflict ended, but it is hard to establish for certain what has been spent by municipalities on commemorative sites.

Based on the records of Kosovo’s Agency for Managing Memorials,  a total 1,166 memorials have been built by families, municipalities and veterans’ associations. These include memorial complexes, headstones, statues, busts, war heritage sites and memorial plaques.

Bislim Zogaj, head of Kosovo’s Agency for Managing Memorials, said that memorials sponsored by the state are only dedicated to commemorating fallen Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas or ethnic Albanian civilian victims.

“Since the establishment [of the agency] in 2013, we have invested 18,430,735.03 euros,” Zogaj told BIRN.

BIRN also asked 26 ethnic Albanian- and Serb-dominated municipalities what they have spent on memorial activities, but 23 of them declined to give any information.

Only the municipalities of Pristina, Drenas/Glogovac and Podujeva/Podujevo responded, and said that they spend no more than 20,000 euros per year on commemorative activities.

Former President Hashim Thaci visits a memorial to Serb victims in the village of Staro Gracko/Gracke in July 2016. Photo: Kosovo Presidency.

Our victims, your crimes

“Ethnocentrism and politicisation, as well as the division of victims according to ethnicity, are the main features of current commemorative practices in the region,” Marigona Shabiu, the head of the Pristina-based Youth Initiative for Human Rights NGO, told BIRN.

Recently-published research by the Youth Initiative for Human Rights about on commemorative practices in the Balkans concluded that as well as ethnocentrism and politicisation, the denial of crimes committed against other ethnic groups is also commonplace.

“Commemorative practices are focused only on crimes committed by members of other ethnic communities, as well as the division of victims according to ethnicity,” Shabiu explained.

The prevailing idea that only the suffering of one’s own people is genuine has been reflected in commemorative practices, she added.

One recent example was a memorial plaque commemorating the 44 people who lost their lives when a NATO missile hit a bus on a bridge in Lluzhan/Luzane on May 1, 1999, which was unveiled last year by the mayor of Podujevo, Shpejtim Bulliqi.

The plaque only commemorated the 31 Kosovo Albanian casualties, while the names of 13 Serb victims were not listed.

In 2020, the municipality of South Mitrovica also failed to list a five-year-old Roma girl’s name on a plaque commemorating victims of a massacre in 1998.

Marinko Djuric, a Kosovo-born Serb who is a member of an association representing families of missing persons, argued that such ethno-nationalist narratives in commemorative practices should be avoided.

“What we all need is solidarity with all victims, regardless of their [ethnic] affiliation,” Djuric told BIRN.

Amer Alija from the Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo said that local and state institutions sometimes contribute to the reinforcement of one-sided narratives.

“Those narratives put forward selective versions of history,” Alija told BIRN.

“Rejecting victims on ethnic grounds is an insult to the victims and their families and only deepens the divisions between communities in Kosovo,” he added.

In 2016, Kosovo’s then president, Hashim Thaci, became the first senior official to pay tribute at a memorial to 14 Serbs killed in July 1999 in the village of Staro Gracko/Gracke.

But his gesture, as a former Kosovo Liberation Army leader, was not welcomed by some of the families of the Serb victims. Thaci was criticised for being insincere and using the commemoration for his own political motives, amid rumours that he could soon face indictment in The Hague for war crimes, as later happened.

Whether it was sincere or not, Thaci’s move to pay respect to victims from another ethnic group has not been emulated since then by other top Kosovo Albanian or Serb politicians.

“We still don’t see any abandonment of ethno-nationalist narratives in commemorative practices and solidarity with all victims,” Shabiu said.