„25 years since the Serbian terrorist attack on the Panda cafe in Pec,“ the Kosovo Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, said in a Facebook post, announcing the installation of a memorial plaque at the former cafe where six Serbian youths were killed in 1998. This crime has never been solved, and the real perpetrators have never been brought to justice.
„At the height of Serbia’s terror against Albanians, six Serb youths were executed in the premises of this bar, on December 14, 1998, on the order of Serbian state security,“ reads the newly erected memorial plaque in Pec.
The trilingual message – in Albanian, English, and Serbian, states that six innocent Albanian youths were imprisoned and severely tortured for the crime „staged by the Serbian authorities“. Although they were later acquitted, the damage done to them was irreparable, the plaque adds.
Kurti states that the young men were executed in an attempt to „justify the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Kosovo.“
In the accompanying statement, Kurti claims that at that time another 150 Albanians were arrested in Pec, and that six young Albanians were released from the prison in Leskovac in a group of 400 released prisoners in 1999. They were also acquitted by the Serbian court in November of that year, even though they were convicted and sentenced to year-long prison terms, but with international mediation, five were released, while the sixth remained in prison until 2000.
The Kosovo PM reiterated that no one in Serbia has been held accountable, noting where the case stands today, and the fact that the parents of the murdered youth demanded that the Serbian president to „testify“ about his own statement that he made a decade ago: „Panda was not carried out by Albanians.“
„The Serbian state continues to hide the truth about the slain Serbian youth, even a century later. Just as it continues to deny the crimes committed against Albanians during the 1998-99 war,“ alleged Kurti.
„This silence speaks of the unchanged political mind of Serbia and the Republic of Kosovo. It testifies to the close connection between the non-recognition of the criminal past and the non-recognition of independence,“ Kurti announced today.
In October, Kurti announced that the list of Kosovo’s cultural heritage objects had been „enriched“ and that the „Panda“ cafe in Pec, where Serbian youths were killed in 1998, was also added to it.
In an armed attack carried out by two masked persons on December 14, 1998, in the „Panda“ cafe in Pec, Ivan Obradović (15), Zoran Stanojević (18), Vukota Gvozdenović (16), Svetislav Ristić (18), Ivan Radević (24) and Dragan Trifović (18) were murdered. While Vladimir Lončarević (18) and Mirsad Šabović (34) sustained serious injuries, and Nikola Rajović (18) minor injuries.
Because of this crime, state security at the time arrested a group of local Albanians, and the then-Vice President of the Federal Government of the FRY, in charge of Kosovo and Metohija, Nikola Šainović, announced that the „Panda“ case had been solved.
The arrested Kosovo Albanians, however, were later released from custody due to lack of evidence.
In the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime in Belgrade, an investigation into the massacre in the „Panda“ cafe was launched in November 2015, but the indictment has not yet been filed.
While the judicial authorities remain silent, the current president of Serbia, and the former first vice-president of the Government of Serbia and head of the Bureau for the Coordination of Security Services, Aleksandar Vučić, said on December 26, 2013, in the show „Teška reč“ on TV Pink, that the crime in ‘Panda ‘ was not committed by the Albanians „as we believed until now“, and that „the public will be appalled when the truth is revealed“.
Vučić also made similar statements in the following years.
„We are groping in the dark. I’m almost certain about what happened in the ‘Panda’ cafe, but I have no proof. I’m not sure that our authorities should be proud of what they did then,“ Vučić said in late 2015. He spoke about the crime in „Panda“ again in 2017 and 2018.
The parents of the slain young men have been asking the Serbian president for years to find out who is responsible for the murder of their children. They asked Vučić ten times to meet with them. At the beginning of 2023, Vučić publicly announced several times that he would do so, but so far this meeting has not happened.
In the meantime, they turned to the judicial authorities.
On behalf of the parents, the lawyer, Ivan Ninić, turned to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime, which confirmed at the end of August this year that it had received a request to question Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić as a witness in the case of the murder of Serb youths.
They also announced that they will make a decision on this request.
In another series of criticisms directed against Serbia, Kurti spoke last night about the historical virtues of Kosovo and how Serbia started all the wars in the former Yugoslavia in which it did not take responsibility or apologize for all the human suffering, crimes and destruction it caused. Kurti also underlined the fact that 19 countries bombed one European country meant that „there must have been something very bad“.
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