In the village of Ternje in southern Kosovo, Bekim Gashi lives with an emptiness he cannot fill. He has no graves to visit—only photographs of his mother Hyra and his four sisters, who disappeared after a massacre committed by the Serbian army on March 25, 1999.
“My mother and sisters were killed on that day. For 26 years, I have not known where their bodies are buried. Every time I see a pit, I think they might be lying there,” Gashi says. For more than two decades he has been haunted by the feeling that the truth could lie just beneath his feet but remain out of reach.
The Kosovo War officially ended in June 1999. At that time around 4,600 people were missing in Kosovo. Many cases have since been resolved, but for roughly 1,600 families the war is not over. They live in waiting, in silence, with yellowed photographs and graves that do not exist.
Most of the missing are Kosovo Albanians—about 1,100—while roughly 500 are Serbs, Roma or members of other minorities. The fate of the missing remains one of the deepest wounds of the post-war period: a human, political and moral tragedy unresolved by existing agreements.
The Gashi family originally had 22 relatives recorded as missing; the fate of 14 remains unknown. Bekim and other family members took part in exhumations and pursued years of legal proceedings in Belgrade, but without clear conclusions. “We went to Belgrade in the hope of getting information. The process took six years. In the end, there was no result,” he says.
A new sign of hope came when representatives of the Serbian and Kosovar state commissions for missing persons met for the first time in Shkodra, northern Albania, on February 4, 2026, to discuss concrete steps. A preliminary agreement to form a trilateral commission with Kosovo, Serbia and the EU had been reached in Brussels on January 22.
The meeting in Shkodra followed a May 2023 Kosovo-Serbia joint declaration in which both governments promised to work together to clarify what happened to the missing, as part of EU-led normalization talks.
Participants in Shkodra included Andin Hoti and Kushtrim Gara of Kosovo, and Veljko Odalovic of Serbia. The Kosovar NGO Zeri i Prinderve (The Voice of Parents), which helps search for missing people and supports relatives, sent representative Xhyle Haziri, who described the talks as occurring in a positive atmosphere and “without negative words.”
Haziri said the Serbian side had often been the biggest obstacle, repeatedly delaying meetings and proceedings. Still, she welcomed that after three years a joint meeting had finally taken place. “There are promises that more intensive work will be done in March and that a new meeting will take place,” she said. “I have more hope now than before. Because everyone agreed that the issue of the missing persons must be resolved once and for all.”
Klisman Kadiu, adviser to Kosovo’s deputy prime minister, sounded more cautious. He stressed that progress since the May 2023 declaration has been minimal, largely because Serbia has refused to substantially cooperate. “Without political will, no solution will be reached,” Kadiu said, citing a lack of transparency and the refusal to open state archives as key shortcomings that have unjustifiably prolonged families’ suffering.
Bekim Gashi remains skeptical. He believes the truth is in Serbia. “Serbia took the bodies away. Serbia knows where they are. We are not asking for miracles. We just want the remains and a place where we can go to lay flowers,” he said.
During court proceedings in Serbia, he says, documents from the 549th Brigade of the former Yugoslav People’s Army—daily and monthly mission reports—came up repeatedly. “If the files of this brigade were opened up, everything would be there,” Gashi said. He added that such information is not available in Kosovo.
Gashi also criticized the lack of institutional support and disputes within organizations of relatives of missing persons in Kosovo. “We don’t feel well represented. We are invited to meetings, but rarely. We are not part of the decision-making process,” he said, reiterating the families’ central demand: a place to remember and lay flowers.
This article was originally published in German.