Family believe missing Kosovans alive in Serbia

Halil Hasani is convinced his four missing sons are imprisoned somewhere in Serbia, and that local authorities are not trying hard enough to find them.

Hasani lives with his wife and niece in the village of Caber, in the ethnic Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Pristina.

He says he will never forget the 8 June 1999, a day before NATO signed the deal with Serbia to withdraw its forces from Kosovo, when at 7.30 a.m. Serb police and paramilitary forces took his sons Fadil, 32, Gazmend, 24, Armend, 20, and Hasan, 15, from Zhabar, a nearby village.

For years they were in contact with two separate Serbs, who insisted Hasani's sons were imprisoned in Pozarevac, then Belgrade, back to Pozarevac and finally an unknown location.

Fadil's daughter, Agnes, then only a few months old, stays close to her grandfather.

Twenty-one years after the 1998-1999 war that left more than 10,000 dead in Kosovo, 1,641 are still missing. Mostly ethnic Albanians, but also Serbs and other local minorities too.

Kosovo was Serbia's province until winning independence in 1999.

Serbia refuses to accept Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence and their relationship remain tense.

Lars-Gunnar Wigemark, head of the European Union rule of law mission, or EULEX, acknowledges that the missing persons crisis is "one of the most devastating legacies of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia."

In about ten years, EULEX has conducted 651 field operations resulting in the identification of 456 individuals, including 311 missing persons.

This summer, work is expected to be completed in Kizevak, a large quarry site in southern Serbia, where the satellite photography is implemented to locate the remains of missing persons.

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