The outgoing Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti has said there will be no forgiveness for Serbs that committed war crimes, only justice.
In a Facebook post last night Kurti wrote that there are currently 1641 people still missing following the Kosovo war. These families, he said, are still living in anxiety and suffering two decades later.
“Kids, now adults are waiting for an answer. Elderly people have no knowledge of the date and location of their heirs,” he said
27 prilli i vitit 1999 ishte i kobshëm për gjithë Kosovën.Në këtë datë koinçidon edhe masakra e Mejës. Përvjetori i…
Gepostet von Albin Kurti am Sonntag, 26. April 2020
Kurti wrote that in this case, time does not heal wounds for the family of the missing, rather it adds to the burden that they carry.
“It is not possible to build the future without closing the past properly. We have an obligation to do all we can to cut the path of this lack of justice. The issue of the dead should be the first issue in the future Kosovo-Serbia dialogue. No amnesty, only justice.” he wrote.
27 April is the anniversary of the Meja massacre, one of many carried out against Kosovo Albanians by Serbian police and the Yugoslav Army. At least 327 Albanian men and boys between the ages of 16 and 60 were executed after they were pulled from refugee convoys at a checkpoint in Meja. Their families were ordered to proceed to Albania. The massacre is considered the largest of the entire conflict.
A 19-year-old witness told Human Rights Watch
“They [the police and military] stopped the tractors and began to hit people with pieces of wood and they broke the tractor windows. The men were stopped and taken away, about one hundred men, to a field near the road. The police screamed for us to keep moving so we left a hundred men and we don’t know what happened to them.”
Another witness told them:
“We saw a lot of blood. We were in shock, traumatized. There were about twenty young men lined up neatly in a row, face down, with their hands tied behind their heads. The Serbs said, “Look what we’ve done to these men, now give us your money.” It was in the centre of Meja. The bodies were about four meters away from the road, behind some thorn bushes. I saw some men who had died crouched; other people told us that blood had been taken from them.”
On 28 April, some sixty tractors with trailers entered Albania carrying only women, children and the elderly.
After the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, it was discovered that most of the bodies of Albanian citizens killed in Meja were transported by truck to Belgrade and buried in mass graves.
