Mourning in Lockdown: COVID-19 Transforms Kosovo War Commemorations

The majority of the victims' bodies were not found for years afterwards. The remains of Limani's brother Luan, who was 21 when he was killed, were found in 2014 in a mass grave near Prizren, but three victims are still missing.

This year, because of the coronavirus epidemic, the annual commemoration of the Krusha e Vogel/Mala Krusa massacre was different. Instead of a large gathering of mourners, only close relatives went to the cemetery to pay tribute.

"At the graveyard were two other families, a few metres away," Limani told BIRN.

"It was a very muted commemoration. It seemed to me that it was something with less respect. But at a meeting here in the village, we decided not to mark this anniversary due to the pandemic situation. It's time to avoid everything and stay home," he said.

Spring in Kosovo usually sees a series of large commemorations of wartime massacres that were carried out by Slobodan Milosevic's forces after NATO launched air strikes against Yugoslavia at the end of March 1999.

But like Agron Limani, many relatives of massacre victims have been remembering their beloved ones by paying brief visits to graves or have stayed at home and posted commemorative messages on social media instead.

Kosovo's President Hashim Thaci, who often attends anniversary commemorations across the country, has also been marking the dates of massacres with posts on Facebook. In his latest such post, Thaci commemorated those who died in the village of Rezalle/Rezala, where Serbian forces killed 98 ethnic Albanian civilians on April 5, 1999. 

"In this typical massacre of an unarmed civilian population by the Serbian state, it was mainly men who suffered, and it clearly showed the nature of the mass crimes against humanity ...