Feature

Kosovo’s Forensic Investigators: ‘We are the Voice of the Dead’

Arsim Gerxhaliu (right) in Prekaz in 2002. Photo courtesy of Arsim Gerxhaliu.

Kosovo’s Forensic Investigators: ‘We are the Voice of the Dead’

November 29, 202108:11
November 29, 202108:11
Forensics experts who work on exhumations of mass graves of ethnic Albanians killed in the Kosovo war say they feel anger, psychological pain and a huge responsibility to reveal the truth about how the victims were killed.

This post is also available in this language: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp

“The bodies had been thrown into the grave mercilessly and hurriedly. When I first touched the remains of a body, I shuddered with horror. It seemed to me that each of them was telling me his own history of his death. It was something surreal,” Gerxhaliu told BIRN.

He and other forensics experts from Kosovo say that their job makes them feel a huge responsibility to those who were killed, but also puts a heavy psychological burden of pressure on them to find the victims on behalf of their families.

Before going to Batajnica, Gerxhaliu had exhumed the bodies of people who died in a wartime massacre in Izbica, a village in the central Kosovo municipality of Skenderaj/Srbica, where he discovered that one of them had been buried alive. “I thought that I wouldn’t be faced with anything to shock me [in Serbia]. But Batajnica was something totally different [from Izbica],” he said.

After NATO’s bombing raids began in March 1999, Yugoslav Army troops and Serbian police and paramilitaries went on a killing spree in Kosovo. To remove evidence of war crimes, lorry loads of bodies, some of which had already been buried once in Kosovo and then dug up again, were taken to locations in Serbia for secret reburials.

“When I took out the remains of a seven-year-old child, with them was a bag of clothes. The child’s jacket sleeve fell off because it was rotten. As I bent down to get the sleeve, I thought I heard a voice say: ‘Where have you been for so long?’” Gerxhaliu recalled.

“I was stunned. I started to cry. I felt anger, pain, hatred… Above all, I felt weak, like someone from a poor, weak country. Then a Serbian doctor told me: ‘I’m sorry but we have to move on.’”

‘War is not over for many people’


Arsim Gerxhaliu (left) with UN and Serbian investigators checking body bags with the remains of ethnic Albanians found in Batajnica, Serbia, May 2005. Photo: EPA/SASA STANKOVIC.

The grave sites in Batajnica were eventually found to contain 744 civilians. But some of the bodies had initially been discovered back in April 1999, when a fisherman in the eastern Serbian village of Tekija discovered a refrigerator truck, dumped in the waters of the River Danube, which had risen to the surface.

The truck had no licence plates, just a logo suggesting that it belonged to the PIK Progress Export Slaughterhouse from the Kosovo town of Prizren. Inside were scores of decomposing human bodies.

“They had forgotten to deflate the tyres and the truck had quickly come to the surface. They had underestimated the power of the river and what the truck was hiding inside,” Gerxhaliu said.

The head of the Serbian Interior Ministry’s Public Security Department, Vlastimir Djordjevic then gave the orders for an operation to conceal the victims’ corpses and rebury them at the police training centre in Batajnica. Djordjevic was eventually sentenced to 18 years in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

To date, the bodies of more than 946 Kosovo Albanians have been exhumed in Serbia.

Gerxhaliu was also involved in exhumations in Rudnica, a village near Raska in southern Serbia, which started in 2006 and then continued in ten different locations. The first human remains were found in 2013 under the foundations of a public transport company building that had been built above the mass grave in 2002.

“We encountered an unwillingness to demolish the building under which the bodies had been laid. It looked like someone knew about it and they kept resisting,” Gerxhaliu said.

He recalled that parents who had lost their children became his biggest burden. “They were telling me: ‘Bring us something, our patience is running out.’” The bodies of 54 individuals were eventually recovered from the mass grave site in Rudnica.

Speaking a few days after his mandate ended as director of Kosovo’s Institute of Forensics, Gerxhaliu spoke in a tone of anger and disappointment as he looked back on what he had experienced: “Each day was another day of a war which is not over for many people.”

‘We know how much they suffered’


Naim Uka at an exhumation. Photo courtesy of Naim Uka.

Naim Uka, who heads the Division for Missing Persons at Kosovo’s Institute of Forensics, explained that exhuming war victims leaves forensic experts with a psychological burden of responsibility.

“We are the voice of the dead. They speak through us. Until the case is closed and you testify in court, you live with the story of the deceased,” he told BIRN.

“If someone gets punished, you feel at ease. But when this does not happen, there is a black hole inside us.”

Uka couldn’t hold back his tears as he spoke about the experience of bringing children’s bodies out of mass graves.

“It’s easier when you find the corpses of adults. But when you take a child’s corpse in your hands, you feel broken,” he explained. “It’s difficult to curb the feelings of hatred and be professional.”

Uka, who chairs the Division for Missing Persons at Kosovo’s Institute of Forensics said that when it comes to emotions, forensics experts are no less vulnerable than anyone else when faced with monstrous crimes.

“When we see their mutilated bodies or the places where they got hit, we know how much they suffered and how much they prayed to die,” he said.

He said that when he works for many hours in mass graves, his emotional relationship with the dead becomes more intense. Once, he said, he felt that he was hearing voices, “like they were real. It seemed that they were screaming inside the grave.”

Uka said that an atmosphere of distrust and hostility between Serb and Albanian teams of forensic experts has always dogged the searches.

“When we talked with [Serbian] police officers who served in Kosovo, we often imagined that they could be the ones who might have committed this massacre,” he said.

Information about the locations of suspected grave sites was a source of constant disagreements between the two teams. Sometimes, Uka claimed, the Serbs would be given the coordinate’s locations but not excavate in the exact place whose coordinates they had – and find nothing.

Local residents who lived near the sites where they exhumed secretly-buried bodies were always very cooperative, however. “People do not want to live near a crime scene,” said Uka. “Although they are afraid to talk.”

Next year, there are plans to carry out more excavations in three locations near the south-western Serbian town of Novi Pazar. More than two decades after the war, Gerxhaliu said that finding the bodies of the secretly-buried victims will again focus attention on the crimes that were committed by Serbian forces.

“Bodies from atrocities have always come back to haunt them,” he said. “And to haunt us as well.”

Serbeze Haxhiaj


This post is also available in this language: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp


Copyright BIRN 2015 | Terms of use | Privacy Policy


This website was created and maintained with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of BIRN and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.