While the West may think it brought back the Albanians to Kosovo, more than 2,000 are still being held in Serbian jails.
PRISTINA, Kosovo -- Albin Kurti knew he was in danger. The 24-year-old student activist took precautions, varying his route to the unheated brick offices of the independent student union of Pristina's underground university where he was co-president, speaking in code on his mobile phone, and frequently sleeping away from home. But he always suspected that, if the Serbian security service wanted to get him, it would.
He was right. Kurti, his father, Zaim, and brothers, Arianit and Taulant, were arrested by Serbian special police in the Pristina home on April 21. His father and brothers were eventually released. But Albin, after being held time for a time in the Lipjan prison, was moved to a jail in the Serbian city of Krusevac, where he is reportedly currently imprisoned.
Flora Brovina was also jailed on April 21. The pediatrician and human rights activist, who reportedly had been running an emergency medical center for displaced people and women in labor, was arrested by Serbian special police outside her home here. She is now believed to be held in a prison in Pozarevac, Serbia.
Kurti and Brovina are two of more than 2,270 Kosovo Albanians held as political prisoners in Serbia, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Another 1,500 Kosovo Albanians are still listed as missing, including 800 from the south-western Kosovo town of Djakovica (Gjakova) alone. Their families suspect they are being held in Serbian jails.
For the families of Kosovo's imprisoned and missing, the war goes on. Crowds of relatives gather almost daily outside the UN headquarters in Pristina to appeal for help in freeing their loved ones.
Brovina's friend, fellow doctor and human rights activist Vjosa Dobruna is the head of Kosovo's Center for Protection of Women and Children. He has been working to get international officials to take up the case of Brovina and the other Kosovo Albanians transported out of Kosovo and taken to Serbian prisons.
"I don't think there are any avenues I haven't pursued," Dobruna said in a telephone interview recently. "I have talked to U.S. Under-Secretary for Human Rights Harold Koh and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana. I have contacted all the agencies, the ICRC, Human Rights Watch, for months since the beginning."
Dobruna and other human rights activists are angry that NATO signed a peace agreement with Belgrade that failed to grant amnesty to the thousands of Kosovo Albanians imprisoned by the Serbs for political reasons -- a clause included but never honored in cease-fire negotiated last year by Richard Holbrooke, recently confirmed as U.S. ambassador to the UN.
Early last month, three Kosovo Albanian lawyers were allowed to meet with several of the political prisoners in Serbian jails. The lawyers reported that conditions for the prisoners, although bad, were not as terrible as those under which prisoners had been held during the war.
Natasa Kandic, head of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, organized the lawyers' visits.
"My lawyers from Kosovo have succeeded in tracking and finding some 30 to 35 Kosovo Albanians from the missing list in the prisons. All of them are >from Djakovica and were arrested in April and May," Kandic said by telephone from Belgrade. "It is good news. But the list of the missing is long."
In addition to the 1,500 missing Kosovo Albanians, and 2,270 in Serbian jails, the Humanitarian Law Center has complied a list of more than 250 missing Kosovo Serbs. Despite the fact that no provisions were made for the missing and imprisoned in agreements signed by NATO and the Yugoslav Army generals that eventually halted the war, Kandic believes the Serbian authorities may be willing to negotiate a deal.
Still, learning that their loved ones are in a Serbian prison "is good news for their relatives," Kandic said. "Because, unfortunately, those on the missing lists who are not in Serbian prisons are probably dead."
Laura Rozen is a correspondent for the Institute
for War & Peace Reporting, an independent non-profit organization
supporting regional media.