Kurti demands Serbia unseal army file locked until 2044
Standing at the excavation site near Zubin Potok, Kosovo's acting prime minister asked the EU and Washington to press Belgrade over a Yugoslav Army file classified for 30 years in 2014.
Albin Kurti, the acting prime minister in Pristina, travelled on August 1 to the village of Mala Kaludra near Zubin Potok, where crews are digging for human remains. From a site he described as barely reachable by vehicle, he asked the European Union and the United States to push Serbia into lifting the secrecy stamp on its wartime records.
Teams from the Institute of Forensic Medicine, forensic experts and anthropologists are working at the location, with representatives of the European Union and EULEX present. Kurti said the remains are not in a single spot but scattered across a wider area, which is why the dig may run for weeks and possibly months.
It is painful, sad and distressing to see that 27 years after the end of the war, the truth they tried to bury and erase is coming to light
That was how Kurti described the ground in front of him. Most of what he said next, though, concerned paperwork that is not in Kosovo at all.
Why does the 38th Brigade file stay shut until 2044?
Kurti named a specific document: the file of the 38th Motorised Brigade of the Yugoslav Army, classified in 2014 for a period of 30 years, meaning until 2044. By his account, the file concerns a group of 23 intellectuals from Mitrovica detained by Serbian forces on April 19, 1999. Leave that deadline in place and families would wait another 18 years to read a page of it.
The request did not go to Belgrade directly. Kurti addressed Brussels and Washington instead, which moves declassification out of the legal track and into the diplomatic one, tying it to the pace of the dialogue rather than to the investigation running in northern Kosovo. More than 1,500 families, according to the figures he cited, are still waiting for word on relatives who disappeared.
What the Special Prosecution Office says
Nora Luta, spokeswoman for the Special Prosecution Office in Pristina, said more than ten exhumation orders have been issued so far and asked newsrooms to hold back until the investigative steps are complete.
More than ten exhumation orders have been issued so far, all of them within these investigative actions. We cannot speak about results while the process is not finished
Luta said. She followed that with a direct appeal to newsrooms:
We ask for understanding, and for any reporting that has not been confirmed by the competent institutions to be avoided.
The prosecution says the Mala Kaludra site came out of years of joint work by the Kosovo Police and the Special Prosecution Office, and that the case remains at the investigation stage. The number of remains recovered has not been confirmed. Autopsies and DNA analysis come first, and neither has a fixed deadline.
From a detention order to a political one
Srpske novine reported on Mala Kaludra earlier, when two suspects were ordered held for a month. At that point the story moved on measurable steps: arrest, detention, investigative actions. Kurti’s visit added a second layer, one that asks not for evidence but for an archive, and an archive held by another state.
Both lines have been running since August 1, at different speeds. The judicial one depends on the laboratory and the prosecutors in Pristina and shifts with every new exhumation. The diplomatic one depends on whether Brussels and Washington take up the demand as their own. If they do not, the clock written into the 38th Brigade file in 2014 stands, and it runs out in 2044.
