“I hope he was dead, not alive,” says Ibush Berisha whenever he talks about his son who disappeared in the 1998-99 war.
The daughter, the son, the wife, the mother… all dead. They searched for Besnik everywhere for 25 years, but there were no results.
The seventy-year-old from Bardhi i Madh recounts through tears the terrible night of April 18, 1999.
In an interview with KosovaPress, he tells how Serbian military forces had expelled them from their homes, ordering them to head towards Albania.
He will never forget the sad images of barefoot and naked children.

After almost two days of travel, after midnight they had arrived at the border crossing at Qafë Morinë. In the neutral zone controlled by the Serbian army, as Berisha says, the whole family had driven over a mine.

” I said I will just to get out of the way, not to leave the road. During the time I got out of the way, I only know that I was stopping the car, I didn’t know anything else, I put the car in neutral, at that moment it hit the mine. The mine was on the white line. I also have the documents. I was unconscious for a moment… The car was torn in half, the back part was completely gone, all that was left was the hood, the two seats. And I knew what happened”, he says.

Only he and Dritoni, his son, survived this explosion. The bodies of the others were barely found. They are still looking for Besnik.

“The Yugoslav army is responsible for that case, not us, nor anyone else. Slobodan Milosevic’s generals, they should answer why they planted the mine when thousands of civilians passed through there… I will hope until I die. I hope he is dead, I hope he was dead and not alive. Because being alive is worse, the Serbs can do anything. They accused us of organs, what did they do? You think they did not take organs, but we have no evidence”, he tells KosovaPress.

In the last war in Kosovo, over six thousand people disappeared. Of these, 1,600 are still missing and more than 800 thousand people were displaced during the years 1998-1999.
Kosovo continues to ask Serbia to reveal their whereabouts, but without success.
The Chairman of the Government Commission for Missing Persons, Andin Hoti, tells KosovaPress which locations in Serbia have been excavated over the past year.

“During 2024, two working group meetings were held and both sides, Kosovo and Serbia, committed to addressing some of the points or some of the locations. From the Serbian side, we had commitments to go to at least three locations within 2024. One of them is Kozhle, the second is Batajnica and Petrovosello. In August 2024, Serbia called us, the Kosovo experts, to go to the location in Kozhle. We sent the experts, since the territory of Serbia is managed by Serbia, they are the ones who decide on the report of the field activities there, they went and saw the terrain and stayed for an hour or two and that was it. Serbia said ‘no, you can’t work here because it’s a location with waste’. This happened in August when in fact we work in the summer season. They said we’re leaving it for next year,” said Hoti.

Meanwhile, within the territory of Kosovo, over 20 locations have been excavated, where 34 people have been identified.

Bekim Blakaj, who heads the Humanitarian Law Center in Kosovo, considers that there has been no progress during the past year.

The relatives are demanding that internationals put pressure on Serbia, says the chairman of the Coordinating Council of Relatives of Missing Persons, Ahmet Grajqevci.

Kosovo aims to return to several locations this year, while excavations are expected to begin in Istog and Mitrovica.

Ibush Berisha from Bardhi i Madh calls on local institutions to treat the issue of missing persons seriously.