The disappeared in Kosovo and Northern Ireland: what humanitarian resolve?
by Besian BEHA and Liam McBURNEY, December 6th, 2024
"The following article was originally published by Shared Future News and the Association of Journalists of Kosovo, as part of a series, Reporting on a Troubled Past. It is republished here, with permission, for potential interest of our readers."
The last time he saw his son, Reshat, was in 1998. On 30 August, at 1.00am, Reshat left home, eager to join the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Despite embarking on a journey with no certainty of survival, Bajram Qerkini did not say farewell to his son. Recalling the last moments with him, just as the fighting officially began between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Serbian Army, Qerkini explained:
"He didn't want to say goodbye. I had told him that he's a grown man — if you want to join the KLA, do it, or do whatever you will.”
On the same night Qerkini’s son left home, eight people disappeared, and nothing has been known of them since. For 26 years, the sorrow has weighed heavily on Qerkini, who is a co-founder and executive director of the Missing Persons Resource Centre.
Qerkini says he still expects his son to return alive:
“We are parents — only a parent can understand such pain. In my heart, I am with him everywhere. He left home alive, and I wait for him to return alive. The blame lies like an orphan (Idiom), but the main responsibility falls on politics. They’ve never done enough.”
Qerkini’s ultimate wish, as an old man, is to receive any information about his son.
Reshat Qerkini is one of 1,636 people who remain missing in Kosovo — 1,081 Albanians, 415 Serbian, and 140 belonging to other communities. These figures are from the Humanitarian Law Center, with individual stories published in a book, Dignity for Payment.
Among the 415 missing Serbs is Paun Zhizhkovic. He had been a teacher, and the last time he was seen was at the "Nikola Tesla" school in Ferizaj on 28 September 1999. According to his daughter, Jasmina Zhivkovic-Jovanovic, he was kidnapped at the school along with his colleague, Marko Stojanovic:
“The greatest compliment I receive is when people say my behavior reminds them of my father. I’ve grown up cherishing memories of him. It’s something that completely changes the life of a family. Neither I nor my sisters wore white dresses on our wedding days — to escape the pain.”
Paun Zhizhkovic remains missing.
Jasmina Zhivkovic-Jovanovic, a former MP in the Kosovo Assembly, says that shedding light on the fate of the missing persons has become a political issue. Jovanovic emphasizes that there has been a lack of will to find the perpetrators who kidnapped her father:
“In Kosovo, there are still [over] 1,600 missing persons. Their families are lost, weak, and unable to do anything about it. Unfortunately, this issue has long become political, rather than one of human rights, justice, and truth. Until it becomes politically advantageous for someone to solve it, we will remain without answers about where our loved ones are.”
Northern Ireland: a humanitarian not criminal approach
The context and approach towards addressing the issue of missing persons due to the conflict in Northern Ireland is remarkably different.
As part of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, a commission was set up for the specific purpose of identifying and recovering the bodies of those known killed (primarily by Irish republican paramilitary organisations), but their burial locations unknown to the families. (Such persons are also known as “The Disappeared”.) The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) was created by legislation in both the UK and Ireland, which was important because someone could have been killed in one jurisdiction (Northern Ireland, United Kingdom) and buried in another (Ireland) — this proved to be the case, repeatedly.
The crucial element is that the legislation established the process as a humanitarian one, not a criminal one. Whatever information is passed onto the commission can only be used to recover victims; it cannot be used to prosecute people.
Geoff Knupfer, former lead investigator for the ICLVR, described how they receive information and what the commission’s focus is:
“[The information] comes in all shapes and sizes. We’ve had intermediaries and interlocutors with all the major [paramilitary] movements.
“It’s not for me to ask people why they get in touch, but I suspect there were people who did it because their organisation requested it of them, or in other cases, they did it because they felt some moral responsibility or powers of conscience.
“We never, ever ask people what they did at these events… We simply want to know where this individual is and how we find him or her.
Knupfer said that this helped establish trust and confidence of those who cooperated with the ICLVR.
Kosovo: a politicised humanitarian approach
In contrast, this process is not treated in a humanitarian way in Kosovo. As Bekim Blakaj, executive director of the Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo, remarked:
“The problem is the lack of cooperation and political will to provide information. Despite all the promises from leaders in Kosovo, Serbia, and the EU-facilitated dialogue — that the case of the missing persons would be treated as a humanitarian issue rather than a political one — it’s clear that it’s still not being approached that way.”
Andin Hoti is the chairman of the Government Commission on Missing Persons in Kosovo. His father, a prominent Kosovo Albanian politician, disappeared during the conflict in 1999 and his body has never been found. Hoti emphasizes the lack of cooperation from officials in Belgrade to shed light on the fate of the missing:
“Kosovo remains committed to uncovering the fate of the missing, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or religion, but we have always opposed attempts to place equal responsibility on Kosovo.”
Bittersweet success: finding Brendan Megraw
An Example of the ICLVR at work is the case of Brendan Megraw, abducted from his home by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on 8 April 1978. Brendan’s body was recovered from a peat bog near Kells, County Meath, in southern Ireland, over 36 years later, on 1 October 2014.
Brendan’s body was recovered by the ICLVR in their third attempt. The grave was one-metre deep, with his decomposed body found bent over, with his head close to his legs and feet, which had been crossed. He had a balaclava on and the clothes he was last seen in — a beige duffle coat, blue jeans, a wool cardigan, and brown lace-up brogues. He had been shot in the front of the head.
Kieran Megraw described his emotions when he arrived at the site where the ICLVR pinpointed where the IRA had buried his older brother:
“It was joy, grief, sadness, anger… To think he had been taken and buried in such a manner — Ireland is a country where you respect the dead, you have a wake [pre-funeral social gathering].”
Kieran described how important their wake service for Brendan was, and is so for other families who have found their missing loved ones:
“You want to do [have a wake]. And you want the people who have given the information to see this is the outcome.
“This is what we want for all the families of the disappeared.
“Rather than someone laying in a bog or in a beach, we get them back home; that is the number one target.
“We might never get the answer [to questions ‘why did they kill him, when did they bury him’], but at least he’s back home and buried with his parents — that’s for all the families of the disappeared.”
Waiting to win the lottery: the ongoing search for Columba McVeigh
Dympna Kerr’s brother, Columba McVeigh, was another one of 17 murder victims in Northern Ireland known as “the Disappeared”. Columba was abducted at age 19, after leaving his Dublin flat to buy a packet of cigarettes in 1975.
In September 1998, an IRA spokesperson acknowledged to the newspaper An Phoblacht/ Republican News that the IRA secretly killed and buried "a small number of people" in the 1970s. One person in the list was Columba McVeigh, who the IRA claimed had confessed to being a British army agent with instructions to infiltrate the IRA.
There have been six searches to date, without success, at Bragan Bog near Emyvale, County Monaghan. The family continue their hope that Columba’s remains will be found so that he can be buried with his parents.
Asked of her thoughts of Columba, Dymapna said:
“I was 22 [when] Columba was abducted. I have the prayer card sitting on my living room table with his picture. I think of him every day… I can't let myself think of what he would have been thinking on that drive up to the bog. I can't think of that every day but you do every now and again.”
Dympna spoke of family events that have been missed:
“Columba doesn't know that I married Malcolm and had children over here [in England]. He doesn’t know about [his brother] Oliver and his family. I know it's a silly thing but, I always say, ‘I have two girls and one boy; [brother] Eugene has two boys, and one girl; Oliver has three girls. We needed Columba to have three boys to even things up.’”
Asked about how it affected life with their parents, Dympna said:
“My mom came over [to England], for [Dympna’s daughter] Joanne’s christening. My dad couldn't come to that, because the two of them couldn't leave the house together — somebody had to wait in case Columba came home. They got a new front door and Columba wouldn't have the key; the old key wouldn't fit in it. So, they couldn't go out and lock the house. Somebody always had to be in the house, in case he came home.”
Dympna spoke of what it would mean to recover Columba’s remains:
“If I got told that they found Columba’s remains, that would be like winning the lottery for me… I’m under no illusion of what we will get back, but there'll be enough there for DNA to say, ‘Yes, it’s him.’ We will get that coffin to carry into Donaghmore chapel to have a funeral mass and carry that out, put it in that grave beside mum and dad, and know that was our mother’s dying wish fulfilled.
“I’m not going to forget about him. I'll never forget him. Life's a circle, and his circle is not complete until that coffin goes in that grave.”
Supporting families
Kieran Megraw spoke about the psychological support provided by WAVE Trauma Centre, particularly for his mother:
“They got together at WAVE and realised that they were able to chat about their feelings… Most of the mothers probably wouldn’t have shown too much (emotion) to the rest of the family, thinking about them, but they were still very conscious about, ‘My son is missing, where is he?’”
Dympna also spoke about the support she received:
“Sandra Peake [chief executive officer at WAVE] is my safety blanket. Sandra took the families of the disappeared under her wing and gave [us] a voice.
“She got me into speaking (publicly), and introduced me to citizenship education, a course that teaches you how to tell your story. We have gone to universities and I tell our story. We went to the United Nations Offices in Geneva and spoke with the High Commissioner for Human Rights, where I told my story.
“That’s all because of WAVE. I could never have done that without them. I could never repay them for what they've done for me.”
In Kosovo, the Missing Persons Resource Centre (MPRC) was established by the United Nations MIssion in Kosovo (UNMIK) in 2017, to serve as a neutral meeting and information-sharing venue for families of missing persons from all ethnic backgrounds in Kosovo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnJnflXWs44
As spoken by ethnic Serbian and Albanian participants in a showcase video (above), hope is shared by relatives:
“The opening of the Missing Persons Resource Centre gave a lot of hope to the families.
“The centre made it possible to come together and discuss the issue.
“Hope is always present. We hope everyday that the situation will improve and all missing persons will be found.”
The 2023 declaration of Serbia President Aleksandar Vučić and Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti on missing persons explicitly recognises that the issue of missing persons is a humanitarian one, and noted the urgent need for additional efforts to alleviate the human suffering of the families. Also, the Joint Declaration on Missing Persons — signed on 10 July 2018 at the London Summit, as part of the Berlin Process — participants pledged to refrain from any politicisation of the missing persons issue. However, the same joint declaration contains a section on the framework for establishing the facts of war crimes and crimes of atrocity.
Until a way can be found to de-politicise learning the truth of those who have gone missing in Kosovo — and anywhere else dealing with a legacy of violent conflict — the families of the missing will need to maintain their hope with emotional support, until they learn news of their loved ones.
NOTES
Anyone with information on any of the four outstanding ICLVR Disappeared cases — Joe Lynskey, Columba McVeigh, Robert Nairac and Seamus Maguire — should contact the ICLVR. All information is treated in the strictest confidence.
The ICLVR can be contacted by telephone: +353 1 602 8655; email: secretary@iclvr.ie
CrimeStoppers (UK) can be contacted on 0800 555 111 and the untraceable anonymous online form is at www.crimestoppers-uk.org.
This article is part of a series co-authored by Kosovo and Northern Ireland participants in a peace journalism project, Reporting on a Troubled Past, with funding from the British Embassy Pristina and the National Union of Journalists Belfast & District Branch. The facts presented and views expressed are those of the authors and editorially independent of any funder.
ENDS
