Ahmet Grajqevci, chairman of the Coordinating Council of Associations of Families of Missing Persons in Kosovo, said that suspicions about the existence of mass graves in northern Kosovo and Serbia date back to the end of the war. According to him, recent developments in Zubin Potok have strengthened the belief that there may be other sites in the area where the bodies of people who went missing during the war were concealed.
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Grajqevci stated that the relocation and concealment of the bodies were carried out as part of an organized state plan.
In a statement to eo, he said that from the outset, the families had suspected the presence of between two and four mass graves in the north. However, in the first years after the war, it was not possible to investigate these suspicions due to a lack of resources and authority.
“From the beginning, we suspected that there could be two, three, or as many as four mass grave sites in the north. We say this because we went there several times with Jashar Jupa, the late former commander of the War Crimes Police, as well as with UNMIK. But we only viewed those places from the surface. We did not have the equipment to conduct further searches, while the authority of UNMIK and our police at the time was very limited. We had no technology or equipment of any kind that could help us discover anything,” he said.
He also referred to documents belonging to the Užice Corps that were seized in the Podujeva area, as well as evidence concerning the clearing of the terrain, raising suspicions that another mass grave may be located near Raška.
“I must also connect this matter to the Užice Corps. In documents seized in the Podujeva area, the witness explains that after the operations carried out, including killings, looting, burnings, and expulsions, each platoon was tasked with what is called ‘asanacija terena’ in Serbian, meaning the clearing of the terrain. This involved collecting the bodies, burying them, or transporting them by truck to another location, where they were then buried and recorded with numbers and complete details. The records also included the villages, the number of people taken from them, houses burned, material damage, and animals, such as cows and calves, because all of this had to be documented as part of the clearing of the terrain. The witness says that after the bodies were loaded onto a truck at Kërshi i Dudës, the corps commander gave the direction ‘pravac Brevenik.’ I do not know where Brevenik is located, but when I looked it up on a map, it appeared to be on the outskirts of Raška. For this reason, the presence of a mass grave is also suspected in that area,” he said.
