The alternative archive

A five-storey building near Prishtina’s City Park looks like just any other apartment block that was built decades ago. The traces of time are beginning to show. Parts of the facade are crumbling and on the verge of falling to the ground, while the yellow paint has faded significantly.

A few meters from the entrance, a chair sits under the shade of some trees, offering residents a respite from the summer heat. Nearby, Ahmet Grajqevci, a 70-year-old originally from Fushë Kosovë, stands with a cigarette in his hand, enjoying a relaxing moment away from his daily chores.

His apartment, slightly larger than 50 square meters and reached by climbing a few stairs, has been transformed into an office. From here, he leads the Coordinating Council of Family Associations of the Missing in Kosovo (CCFAMK). Grajqevci stores thousands of pages of documents about missing persons during the 1998-99 war in Kosovo and evidence of crimes committed by Serbian forces during that period. Important documents from Kosovo’s recent history are preserved inside this building.

Since 1998, Grajqevci has collected evidence of war crimes committed in all municipalities of Kosovo. This includes photographs, video recordings, documents about missing persons and data about mass graves in Kosovo and Serbia. These materials were either collected by himself or provided by the victims’ family members. He believes there could have been even more documents, but some disappeared. Many were burned during the war, including those in Grajqevci’s house, where a large amount of evidence was lost. Hundreds more were damaged by post-war deterioration and rendered unusable, while some were kept by private individuals and did not receive the necessary care.

For several months now, Grajqevci has spent his days accompanied by the sound digitization equipment for preserving these materials, which he said he has been waiting for a long time. The equipment was provided by the British Embassy.

“Thanks to this digitization, which I had dreamed about, these materials are now safe,” he said.

The Coordinating Council has operated as a nongovernmental organization in Kosovo since 2000. The council comprises 24 organizations that operate as a single entity with the aim of documenting data on missing persons and other facts related to war crimes.

After digitization, the materials will remain with the council. “We want to preserve them ourselves, because we think they are disappearing, like the former Commission for Investigating Missing Persons and War Crimes has disappeared,” he said.

After the end of the war in 1999, the Commission for Investigating Missing Persons and War Crimes (KHPZhKL) was established by the interim institutions under the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) administration. Grajqevci recalled that, at that time, there were two priorities for gathering as much evidence as possible. The first was marking the sites of crimes and mass graves, as it would have been difficult to do this later.

“The second priority was to collect notes and interviews from the survivors’ family members. We set up in municipalities, compiled lists and went out into the field. We gathered testimonies for hours,” said Grajqevci, showing a photograph from the interviews he conducted in Lybeniq, Peja.

The Coordinating Council was initially part of the KHPZhKL. However, Grajqevci and others established the Coordinating Council as a separate entity from the KHPZhKL. This was because in the KHPZhKL, created by the interim government, UNMIK had primary authority in handling the cases. According to Grajqevci, local commissions were not allowed to work in parallel to collect evidence of the war. He claims this led to the loss of some materials, as they were not given the necessary care.

“On the last day, I closed the door, I organized the material, and nothing is known about this data since we did not have access,” Grajqevci explained.

As he moved through his workspace, the office was completely filled with documentary photos. Opening a cupboard in another room revealed that the entire space was packed with red folders. Each folder contains details about over 1,000 missing persons in Kosovo. Grajqevci said that he has data on almost every missing person from Fushë Kosovë, Obiliq and Lipjan, as well as information from other municipalities. “Each missing person in the Council’s registers has their history here, whether they have been found or not,” he said. “Each record includes dates, minutes, artifacts, photographs, autopsies and DNA analyses. This completes the process of digitizing data for a missing person,” he explained, wiping his sweaty forehead due to the high temperature inside the office.

Grajqevci explained that this data was gathered by filling out specific forms with identifying information about the missing person, the place they were last seen, witnesses to the case, statements from family members and other important information. If the missing person is found later and DNA analyses are conducted in cooperation with the Institute of Forensic Medicine, the council receives these DNA results, provides the original file to the family members and keeps a copy for each file. If the missing person has not been found, the DNA and other sections remain blank.

Information about the missing is not the only data Grajqevci possesses.

“We have separate archives with over 1,000 hours of video recordings, 86,000 pages of documents, not counting videos and photographs, but there is more as well. The materials I have, the state does not,” said Grajqevci, pointing to a photograph of the reburial of members of the Jashari family.

In addition to the video recordings with footage from numerous massacres in Kosovo and war crimes in various villages that he personally documented, many others were given to him by family members. This arose in the absence of a state institution dedicated to collecting evidence of crimes committed during the war.

“The state is not able to have these as they were taken firsthand, immediately after the war. Individuals may have a tape or some photographs, but not an archive like this,” he said.

According to statistics from the Humanitarian Law Center, a nongovernmental organization that documents human rights violations in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, over 13,000 civilians were killed during the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo. It is estimated that over 1,500 people are still missing, and 20,000 men and women were raped. Despite these extensive war crimes, the government of Kosovo has not established an institution for collecting war evidence or an institutional archive for preserving it.

In 2011, the Institute for War Crimes was founded for the first time by the decision of the government headed by Hashim Thaçi from the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK). The decision was taken at the proposal of former Minister of Justice Hajredin Kuçi. But in 2018, the government led by Ramush Haradinaj from the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo (AAK), which at that time governed in coalition with PDK, decided to close it, because as then-Minister of Justice Abelard Tahiri said, the Institute was not appropriate and that to function properly, a law is needed for it.

In 2023, the Assembly of Kosovo approved the Law on the Institute for Crimes Committed During the War in Kosovo. The institute officially received its first files on war crimes in February 2024 from Grajqevci, acting in his capacity as the head of the Coordinating Council.

Family commitment to the preservation of historical memory

Running to escape the rain, Nusret Pllana struggles to find the key to open the garage door, which he has turned into a storage space for evidence during the 1998-99 war in Kosovo. Pllana mentions that he will soon be traveling to Germany to distribute his book about war crimes in Kosovo.

Initially, Pllana was part of the Kosovo Liberation Army. During the war, he worked as a journalist at Radio Free Kosovo, where he documented hundreds of crimes committed during the war. Since then, Pllana’s commitment to collecting these testimonies has never wavered.

While Grajqevci’s wish for the digitization of materials has been realized, this remains out of reach for the 65-year-old Pllana. This uncertainty intensifies his fear that all these testimonies may disappear.

“There are many video recordings, over 2,000 VHS tapes. This technology was used before the war. Digitization is not happening because we have no support, only verbal support, but no concrete assistance,” said Pllana. Due to limited space inside, a stack of tapes stuck together with glue is on the roof of the garage. With minimal security for these materials, Pllana emphasizes that no one has helped to institutionalize this archive.

“There’s a risk that all this could disappear, any delayed justice is injustice. 25 years have passed, those eyewitnesses and survivors of massacres, over 600 massacres, they don’t always live, most of them are dead,” said Pllana, who continues to lecture at the Faculty of Education at the University of Prishtina.

On the many tables in this garage, there are more than a dozen books of different sizes. Pllana owns all of them.

Among the hundreds of photographs in the space where Grajqevci works, some are particularly special to him. Pointing to one photograph, Grajqevci noted that his daughter, Sofia, has been by his side, helping him collect these materials since childhood.

“Look, here is Sofia in this photo. Look here, she photographed the Jashari family in 2000. Here she is,” said Grajqevci, showing a photo on his phone. Immediately after the end of the war in Kosovo, she was just 13 years old. “My daughters and sons helped me because I could never have gathered 120,000 pages of evidence of war crimes on my own. My children were a big help. About five or six cameras were broken or damaged during the work — let’s not talk about the equipment,” Grajqevci added, noting that he always used his private car while working in the field.

Grajqevci began his commitment to collecting testimonies from the time of the war by reporting on the massacres that occurred in early 1998 in Likoshan and Qirez, two villages in the Drenica region.