On Wednesday, Kosovo marked its National Missing Persons Day in honor of the 1620 people who are still unaccounted for since the brutal war Serbia waged against the population of Kosovo in 1998-1999.
On April 27, 1999, Serbian troops killed 377 Kosovo Albanian civilians in villages near Gjakova, mainly men and boys, including 36 children who were trying to flee to neighboring Albania.
Some of the bodies were buried in mass graves in Kosovo, others were transported to Serbia to be buried in undisclosed places.
Kosovo leaders paid homage to the Lawn of Sorrow memorial in Meja village which was raised to commemorate those still missing from the war. They called for the international community to put pressure on Serbia to disclose massive graves where those killed during the genocidal war waged by Belgrade were buried.
The remains of nearly 70 percent of those buried in mass graves by Serbian troops, mainly in Kosovo but some also in Serbia, were returned to their families. However, hundreds of relatives are still waiting for the bodies of 1,620 people who are still missing, mainly Albanians.
Andin Hoti, who chairs the Government Committee on Missing Persons called on the European Union to pressure Serbia into revealing the location of mass graves. He also asked that a deadline be set for the country led by Aleksandar Vucic, who was Serbia’s minister of information when his government brutally killed about 13 thousand persons, and displaced nearly 90 percent of all the population.
