Kosovo Prioritizes Opening the Archives of the 37th Brigade and Resuming Excavations in Batajnica

Access to the classified documents of the 37th Motorized Brigade and the resumption of excavations in Batajnica are two of the main requests Kosovo has submitted to the Joint Commission on Missing Persons with Serbia. The Kosovo side considers these to be concrete proof of whether Serbia will implement the commitments made in the Declaration on Missing Persons.

On the other hand, Serbia, within the framework of the same commission, has requested more data and the development of investigations, especially for cases after the official end of the war.

The Joint Commission is expected to meet again during this month, under the mediation of the European Union. This will be its third meeting since its creation, while Kosovo insists that these two requests will show whether Serbia has truly begun implementing the declaration signed three years ago, which also предусматривает access to archives.

The head of the Missing Persons Unit in the Office of the Prime Minister, Kushtrim Gara, said that opening the classified archive would help in the search for missing persons from the massacres carried out by this brigade in the Drenica area, which at that time was commanded by General Lubisha Dikoviq.

“Many of the victims of the massacres in Rezallë, Çikatovë e Vjetër, and Zabel i Ulët carried out by this brigade were found in Raška,” Gara told Radio Kosovo.

“The entire archives of this brigade were reclassified in 2014, when we were excavating in Raška, where this brigade had its base,” he added.

Gara also said that the Kosovo side is seeking the resumption of excavations in Batajnica, after new data was secured that raises suspicions about the presence of a number of victims missing from the war.

“Based on the new data we have secured and the analysis of the information, we have concluded that in Batajnica, near the training ground, there should be another site with 58 bodies of missing persons,” he said.

In the period 2001-2002, in Batajnica, near Belgrade, the remains of 744 victims buried in 9 pits were found near the military training ground, hundreds of kilometers away from the place where they had been killed.

The office of the European Union mediator for the Kosovo-Serbia Dialogue, Peter Sorensen, told Radio Kosovo that the EU “strongly urges the parties to cooperate and engage” in implementing the 2023 Declaration on Missing Persons. It was also underlined that the Joint Commission “provides a framework to support this process and to address practical issues related to implementation.”

According to the Declaration on Missing Persons, Kosovo’s obligations also include investigating cases of missing persons, particularly those after the official end of the war.