A day after an exhumation began in the village of Mala Kaludra near Zubin Potok as part of a war crimes investigation, Kosovo’s Institute for Crimes Committed During the War (IKKL) presented a preliminary institutional list of 13,227 people killed, forcibly disappeared or recorded as having died as a consequence of the Kosovo war.
According to the Institute, 12,230 victims were documented for the period between January 1, 1998, and June 20, 1999, while 997 additional cases were recorded for the period between June 21, 1999, and December 31, 2000.
Acting Prime Minister Albin Kurti, who attended the presentation in Pristina, described the report as an important step in documenting the human cost of the conflict.
„There is no justice without truth, no healing without justice, and no sustainable future without remembrance. This report is institutional testimony to the high price of the freedom that we enjoy today. It represents people, lives, families and stories that cannot be reduced to numbers, but which our state has a duty to document accurately, with dignity and responsibility,“ Kurti said.
He said that of the 12,230 victims documented for the wartime period, 9,948 (81.3%) were killed between March and June 1999.
Among them, Kurti said, were 1,047 children who were killed, 94 children who died as a consequence of the war, while 100 children remain listed as missing.
He added that the Institute’s database would continue to be updated as new information is collected and verified.
Institute: Preliminary database will continue to grow
IKKL Director Atdhe Hetemi said the preliminary list currently includes 13,227 people who were killed, forcibly disappeared or died as a consequence of the war.
He stressed that the list is not intended to be the final register of all war victims but rather the Institute’s first official database compiled under its own methodology.
According to Hetemi, the database includes three categories of victims: people killed during the war, forcibly disappeared persons, and those who died as a consequence of the conflict.
He said the presentation marked „the beginning, not the end“ of the process of building Kosovo’s official database of war victims.
The Institute also reviewed 267 additional cases, but they were not included because they did not meet the established methodological criteria or fell outside the scope of the research.
Hetemi said the database would continue to expand as new information is collected, documentation verified and individual cases confirmed.
According to him, the Institute’s objective is not only to establish the number of victims but also to create a unified institutional database documenting the circumstances of each case and serving as a permanent source for future research.
Exhumation near Zubin Potok
The presentation came a day after war crimes investigations again moved into public focus following the start of an exhumation at a site in the village of Mala Kaludra, near Zubin Potok.
Kosovo’s Special Prosecution announced on Tuesday that human remains believed to date from the war had been found at the location, but said their identity has not yet been established.
The exhumation is being conducted by the Institute of Forensic Medicine and other competent institutions under the prosecution’s order, while forensic examinations are continuing.
The night before, Kosovo Police arrested two Kosovo Serbs on suspicion of committing war crimes against the civilian population during the Kosovo conflict. A court has since ordered both suspects into pre-trial detention.
The case dominated Albanian-language media coverage throughout Tuesday. Numerous television stations and news portals reported live from the excavation site, carried statements from officials and broadcast footage of police operations.
Media outlets also published speculation regarding the possible identity of the remains, including claims that they could belong to a group of missing Kosovo Albanians from North Mitrovica.
Neither the Institute of Forensic Medicine nor the Special Prosecution has confirmed those reports, saying that identification, if possible, can only be established after the exhumation is completed and DNA analysis is carried out.
During a visit to the site, Acting Interior Minister Xhelal Sveçla said Kosovo institutions would continue searching for missing persons and prosecuting war crimes „until the last missing person is found and every perpetrator is brought to justice.“
He also accused Serbia of obstructing efforts to clarify the fate of missing persons, adding that „Serbia must pay the price for genocide.“
Frequently cited figure
The figure of 12,230 victims, repeated by Kurti during today’s presentation, has for years been one of the statistics most frequently cited by Kosovo officials when referring to the Kosovo war.
In public speeches and official statements, the figure is often cited without a detailed explanation of its ethnic, civilian or military composition.
Today’s presentation clarified that the figure refers specifically to victims included in the Institute’s preliminary database for the period between January 1, 1998, and June 20, 1999.
The Institute’s preliminary database, however, contains 13,227 entries, including 997 cases recorded for the period between June 21, 1999, and December 31, 2000.
According to available media reports from the presentation, the Institute did not provide a detailed statistical breakdown of the 12,230 victims by ethnicity, civilian or military status, or other categories, although the preliminary database itself contains names indicating both Albanian and Serbian origin.
Humanitarian Law Center database offers detailed breakdown
Such a statistical breakdown has long been available through the Kosovo Memory Book, maintained by the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) and the Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo (HLCK), one of the most comprehensive databases documenting war victims in Kosovo.
According to the Kosovo Memory Book, 13,535 people were killed or went missing in Kosovo between January 1, 1998, and December 31, 2000. The HLC says the database has since been updated to 13,625 individually documented cases, although the latest publicly available statistical breakdown still refers to the original figure of 13,535.
According to that breakdown, documented victims include:
- 10,812 Albanians
- 2,197 Serbs
- 526 Roma, Bosniaks, Montenegrins and members of other communities
The database also records 10,317 civilian victims, including:
- 8,676 Albanians
- 1,196 Serbs
- 445 members of other communities
It further documents 3,218 members of armed formations, including:
- 2,131 members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo (FARK)
- 1,084 members of the Yugoslav Army and Serbia’s Ministry of Interior
- Three KFOR personnel
The Humanitarian Law Center stresses that these figures are not estimates but individually documented cases established by name through years of research and verification using multiple independent sources.
The Kosovo Memory Book therefore documents victims from all communities, including civilians as well as members of different armed formations.
The two databases also cover different time frames. During the presentation, Kurti referred to 12,230 victims documented between January 1, 1998, and June 20, 1999. The Institute, meanwhile, said its preliminary database includes an additional 997 victims recorded between June 21, 1999, and December 31, 2000. By contrast, the Kosovo Memory Book covers the entire period from January 1, 1998, through December 31, 2000.
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