UN digs up Kosovo graves in search for missing Serbs

Reuters, Wednesday August 24, 09:09 PM

PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro (Reuters) - U.N. forensics experts have begun exhuming 41 graves in the Kosovo capital believed to contain the remains of Serbs who went missing after the arrival of NATO troops six years ago.

Marked with sticks or scrap metal, the graves were located within the grounds of a seemingly abandoned Serbian cemetery, overrun with weeds and next to a railway line.

The head of the U.N. missing persons and forensics office said he believed they were the victims of a spate of kidnappings and murders in the majority Albanian province at the time of the withdrawal of Serb forces and NATO's deployment in June 1999.

"A number of Serbs went missing upon the arrival of KFOR troops, about 50 in the Pristina area alone," Jose-Pablo Baraybar told Reuters at the grave site, referring to the NATO-led Kosovo Force that still patrols the province.

"It is highly likely that people ended up dead in the street. They were collected, taken to the hospital, went through the mortuary and were then simply disposed of in this place."

Behind him, forensics experts in white body suits looked on as a digger scraped awkwardly at the edges of a large pit.

Seventeen graves were marked with Serb names, including those once listed as residents of a local retirement home.

Some were found wrapped in body bags or hospital sheets. One grave was marked with a scrap of metal from a washing machine.

Around 500 Serbs and 2,400 ethnic Albanians are still missing from the 1998-99 war in the southern Serbian province, now governed by the United Nations.

NATO bombed for 78 days to drive out Serb forces accused of killing and expelling thousands of ethnic Albanian civilians as they fought to crush a rebel insurgency.

But the deployment of 60,000 NATO soldiers failed to prevent a wave of revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians, who account for 90 percent of the province's 2 million people.

Kosovo's Albanians expect to win formal independence from Serbia in talks the West hopes to open this year. Serbia says the mountain-ringed province was the birthplace of the Serb nation and can never become independent.