Analysis

BIRN Fact-Check: Are Serbia and Kosovo Ready to Open Their War Archives?

A US soldier from NATO’s peacekeeping force KFOR with a Yugoslav Army commander in Urosevac, Kosovo, in June 1999. Photo: EPA/STATON R. WINTER/STF.

BIRN Fact-Check: Are Serbia and Kosovo Ready to Open Their War Archives?

It’s been reported that Belgrade and Pristina have agreed to open up military and police files from the 1998-99 Kosovo war to help locate the remaining missing persons from the conflict – but experts are highly sceptical.

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Kosovo’s negotiator, deputy prime minister Besnik Bislimi, said he asked Serbia to open up its Yugoslav-era military and police files to help find the locations of wartime mass graves of ethnic Albanians.

Serbia has already asked for the archives of the Kosovo Liberation Army to be opened up so that the bodies of Serbs who disappeared can finally be found.

The head of Belgrade’s delegation, the director of the Serbian government’s office for Kosovo, Petar Petkovic, said after the meeting that “we seem to have made progress”.

But it was unclear whether this ‘progress’ had anything to do with the wartime archives, or whether any agreement on the subject had been reached at all.

After the vaguely optimistic rhetoric that followed the meeting on September 9, recriminations resumed.

Kosovo’s Prime Minister, Albin Kurti accused the Belgrade authorities of “continuing to try to hide bodies of Albanian civilians in mass graves in Serbia”.

Kurti also insisted that Kosovo has nothing to hide: “We have the archives of our country, which include those of the KLA as well, and all evidence and materials belonging to the KLA. We are very open and transparent. Since 1999, we have been under international supervision and you cannot find a country that is more open in terms of archives,” he said.

However, others in Kosovo have insisted that the KLA had no archives as it was a guerrilla force. For its part, Serbia has classified some of the Yugoslav Army’s archives as state secrets.

BIRN has checked the assertions made by both sides in an attempt to gauge whether or not any significant progress is likely to be made in the search for the remaining wartime missing persons as a result of the Brussels meeting.

Was there really a breakthrough in Brussels?


EU envoy Miroslav Lajcak (left) with Kosovo and Serbia’s negotiators Besnik Bislimi and Petar Petkovic in Brussels earlier this month. Photo: Twitter/Miroslav Lajcak.

The European Union’s envoy for Belgrade-Pristina dialogue, Miroslav Lajcak, who hosted the meeting in Brussels between Serbia’s Petkovic and Kosovo’s Bislimi earlier this month, said that there was no particular discussion about wartime archives.

“What was said was just a reconfirmation of what was said many times before, that there are no obstacles from either party to access to archives,” Lajcak told media in Kosovo on September 17.

“This was already said last year and reconfirmed several times before, and Mr. Bislimi also said that there is no KLA archive, only the state archive,” he added.

Lajcak explained that “there was nothing surprising, no particular agreement, but somehow it was misinterpreted”.

Is there a Kosovo Liberation Army archive?


Kosovo Liberation Army fighters in Morina, Kosovo in June 1999. Photo: EPA/FEHIM DEMIR.

When the issue of opening up wartime archives was mentioned for the first time during a previous meeting in Brussels in July last year, Kosovo’s then prime minister Avdullah Hoti said that “regarding the KLA archive, it is an issue for war veterans’ organisations”.

Jakup Krasniqi, a former spokesperson for the KLA who has held various senior political positions since the war, but is now in detention in The Hague awaiting trial for war crimes, made a similar assertion last year: the KLA was a guerrilla group and had no proper archives.

“I am certain that KLA did not possess any organised or written archive, besides what had already been written and said about it,” Krasniqi told BIRN.

He said that internal communications between the KLA’s general headquarters and the headquarters of the guerrilla force’s various operational zones around the country could have been handed over to the Kosovo Protection Corps, a civilian emergency services organisation which was created after the demilitarisation of the KLA and was active from 1999 to 2009.

But Safet Syla, head of the Office for the Heritage of the Kosovo Protection Corps, said that his organisation does not have any KLA material.

But Bardhyl Mahmuti, one of the KLA’s former members, insisted that documents existed but due to the difficult circumstances in which the KLA was operating during wartime, they are not all in one place.

“There are archives. We cannot say there are not. The problem is that they are spread around in different hands. I do not know if, after the war, something was done to collect together the documents related to our liberation war. It should have been,” Mahmuti said.

“Those who have the documentation related to the establishment of the KLA and all political and military developments of that period must hand them over to the State Archives of Kosovo. The issue of our war is not private and no one has the right to keep private documents that are relevant to shedding light on the wartime period,” he added.

Only a few of these documents have entered the public domain so far – some KLA press releases that were used as evidence in the trials of former guerrilla commanders Ramush Haradinaj and Fatmir Limaj and their subordinates at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Will Serbia’s wartime archives be opened up?


Yugoslav Army soldiers flash Serb salutes on the Belgrade-Nis highway in Serbia after the agreement on Yugoslavia’s withdrawal from Kosovo, June 1999. Photo: EPA/JOVAN ZIVANOVIC.

The majority of the archive about the Kosovo war are held by the Serbian Army, as the successor to the Yugoslav Army, and the Interior Ministry, which holds material related to Serbian police operations during the conflict.

Ivana Zanic, director of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre NGO, said that the archives contain information about crimes committed by the army and police the war.

However, in 2015, the Serbian Defence Ministry classified the entire archive of the Yugoslav Army’s 37th Brigade as a state secret for the next 30 years. During the war, the commander of the 37th Brigade de was Ljubisa Dikovic, who then became chief of the Serbian Army’s general staff from 2011 to 2018.

In the zone in which the brigade operated were the villages of Rezalle/Rezala, Cikatove e Vjeter/Staro Cikatovo, Zabel i Ulet/Donji Zabelj and Gllanaselle/Gladno Selo, where civilians were murdered. Some of their bodies were later found in a mass grave in Rudnica in south-west Serbia.

“So [the authorities] calculated in advance that there might be some probability that someone would investigate this, that someone would search for information, and then they closed [the archive] to the public, so those stories now about opening up the archives do not seem to me to represent a genuine will for it to really happen,” Zanic told BIRN.

In 2014, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague sentenced former senior Serbian police official Vlastimir Djordjevic to 18 years in prison, partly for his role in concealing the bodies of ethnic Albanians killed in Kosovo. However, no one has yet been held responsible by Serbian courts.

Zanic argued that despite the statements after the last Serbia-Kosovo meeting in Brussels this month, “neither of them has the genuine will” to address the issue of opening up their archives.

Is there any new progress on the ground?


Excavation at the Kizevak mass grave in Serbia, December 2020. Photo: Marko Risovic.

In Kosovo, the Special Prosecution has issued orders for exhumations in the village of Dren/Dreth in the Leposaviq/Leposavic municipality, in Has in the Prizren the municipality, in Koshare in the Decan/Decani municipality and in Javor in the Malisheva/Malishevo municipality. But although the orders were issued last year, the searches have not started yet.

In Serbia, a new mass grave was discovered in November 2020 in an open-cast mine called Kizevak, near Raska in south-west Serbia. However, this discovery was the result of a witness’s testimony and analysis conducted by the European Union’s rule-of-law mission in Kosovo.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said in June that 11 bodies have been exhumed at the site. No more excavations are planned in Serbia.

Milica Stojanovic


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