Thousands of Kosovo Serbs are still listed as missing

Missing Albanians were the official trigger for NATO to attack Slobodan Milosovic’s Yugoslavia. Nine years on and still nothing has been heard of the whereabouts of hundreds of missing people from that campaign.

A monument in Kosovska Mitrovica was erected for the missing people. They’re the ones nobody is talking about. All the names on the monument are Serbian.

Each morning Brakus Strahinja comes to this small office in Kosovska Mitrovica looking for information about his brother who went missing three months after the NATO bombardment. He’s lost hope he could still be alive. But still prays one day he’ll have a body to bury.

“After the Serbs left our village, my brother went back to see how his house was. We don’t know what happened because nobody ever heard from him again. Everybody in the town loved him. He was good to his Albanian and Serbian neighbours. They had no reason to hurt him,” Strahinja says.

Dragan Janackovic’s father refused to leave his Serb village after all the residents fled during the NATO bombing. He begged him to leave but his father was convinced nothing would happen to him.

“I heard various versions of what happened to my father. One was that he was burnt in one of his houses. Another was that they killed him while he was looking after his cattle. But what I think happened in reality is that one of his neighbours kidnapped and then killed him,” Dragan said.

The office that deals with missing Serbs from Kosovska Mitrovica is only one man – Milorad Trifunovic. His brother too has been missing for years. Only his personal motivation – and desperate faith – keeps him going.

“There are 454 unidentified bodies in the morgue in Pristina. We provided DNA samples but they didn’t do anything with them. Nobody knows whose bodies they are. I’m also convinced the Albanians are selling body parts of Serbs who were kidnapped or who’ve gone missing. I can’t tell it to the families because they still live in hope,” Trifunovic says.

More than 3,000 Serbs are estimated to still be missing in Kosovo.