Amnesty International has strongly criticised the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) on Tuesday, saying that it failed to investigate the abduction and murders of Kosovo Serbs in the aftermath of the 1998-1999 conflict.
According to the non-governmental organisation (NGO), years have passed, but the fate of the majority of the missing on both sides of the conflict is still unresolved, with their families still waiting for justice.
Amnesty claims that for nearly a decade after the conflict, UNMIK police and prosecutors failed to initiate prompt, effective, independent, impartial and thorough investigations into many reports of enforced disappearances and abductions. The NGO newest report adds that UNMIK has failed to investigate some 1,187 war crimes cases.
“As a result, very few of those suspected of criminal responsibility for the war crimes and crimes against humanity have been brought to justice in international or domestic courts,” comments Amnesty’s Sian Jones. He explains that UNMIK’s failure to investigate what constituted “a widespread, as well as a systematic, attack on a civilian population and, potentially, crimes against humanity,” has contributed to the climate of impunity prevailing in Kosovo.
The report and statement of the NGO come on the eve of a UN Security Council debate on Kosovo to be held on 29 August.
“The UN should not be allowed to shirk its responsibility any longer” continues Amnesty and adds that UNMIK’s failure to investigate reports of abductions and killings took place despite being charged by the UN Security Council with protecting human rights in Kosovo. The NGO thus implied that the mission has not fulfiled its obligations and followed the instructions by the UN’s most powerful principal organ.
During the debate on Thursday at the Security Council it is expected that the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will present his regular quarterly report on UNMIK. The report points out that there are still 1,726 persons listed as missing from the Kosovo conflict in the late 90s.
In his report, Ban Ki-moon further writes that unresolved legacies of the conflict, including unsolved cases of missing persons, should remain key priorities.
Amnesty’s report is one of the few to focus on abductions of Kosovo Serbs, allegedly by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), in the period 1998-1999 during the Kosovo war.
The climate of impunity among Kosovo Serbs has recently been fuelled after in 2010 the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the declaration of independence of Kosovo, considered as one of the most important consequences of the conflict in the 1990s and adopted in 2008, did not violate international law.
The fate of Kosovo Serbs and the solving of thousands of missing persons cases seem to have not ‘touched’ also the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) which acquitted of all charges former KLA commander Ramush Haradinaj in 2012.
As regards this particular court decision, the Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic said in a Facebook post at the time that the tribunal was established under international law to try exclusively the Serbian people.
The NGO calls for solving of old missing persons war cases and the debate in the Security Council come, accidentally or not, literally days before the International Day of the Disappeared observed on 30 August and drawing attention to the thousands of people who go missing as a result of an armed conflict.