As more than 1,700 people remain missing from the conflict in Kosovo, relatives are urging the Kosovo authorities to raise the issue at the upcoming UN Security Council meeting.
“We want the missing persons issue to be resolved in the framework of the dialogue on normalization of relations between Pristina and Belgrade, otherwise the whole negotiation and reconciliation process will be unsuccessful ”, a draft version of the letter that will be sent on Tuesday to the Kosovo Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, and Foreign Minister, Enver Hoxhaj, reads.
Both officials are asked to bring up the issue in discussions related to Kosovo and the UN mission to the country at the UN Security council meeting due on August 29.
The meeting comes ahead of August 30, the international day of the disappeared.
“The Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister of Kosovo are obliged to read the letter in front of the Security Council members,” Bajram Qerkini, who drafted the letter, said.
Missing persons were a topic for discussion once in the EU-mediated dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade but the issue did not appear in the final agreement on the normalisation of relations, on April 19.
EU officials have described the issue a humanitarian rather than a political one.
Since the end of the conflict in the 1990s, the International Committee of the Red Cross has been arranging contacts between Kosovo and Serbia on the issue, but progress has remained slow.
Family members of the 1,754 missing people now say that “political international pressure” on Serbia is required to push this issue forward. “Serbian authorities and representatives of Serbian institutions have information on places where mass graves are located”, Prenk Gjetaj, chief of Kosovo’s missing persons commission, said.
But of the 36 locations where excavations were planned in 2012, only 19 were carried out, partly because of security concerns.
This year, the Kosovo authorities plan to exhume some 39 suspected mass graves while work to find the bodies of victims is also continuing in Serbia.
Tuesday 20 August 2013
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/families-urge-kosovo-authorities-to-internationalize-missing-person-issue
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