Raska Honors Brigade Whose Files Pristina Wants Opened

A memorial to members of the 37th Motorized Brigade of the Yugoslav Army was unveiled on August 1 on the plateau outside the primary school in Raska. Ivica Dacic, deputy prime minister of Serbia and interior minister, attended the ceremony. The monument marks 60 members of the unit killed in 1999, three still missing and 186 wounded.

The initiative came from the Association of Members of the 37th Motorized Brigade, backed by the local municipality. Among the guests was Ljubisa Dikovic, the brigade’s wartime commander and later chief of the General Staff of the Serbian Armed Forces.

In his address, Dacic rejected the labels attached to the unit on the Kosovo side.

“I want to say that we fought a defensive war, that all our fighters were fighters for freedom and war heroes, not war criminals”

He then turned to what a monument of this kind means for the town that raises it.

“When a community decides to erect a monument to its brigade, it preserves the memory of all its members. Of those who laid down their lives, of those who went through the war carrying the weight of their duty, and of their families, who bore the greatest sacrifices alongside them”

A culture of remembrance, Dacic said, is not only an obligation of the state but also a responsibility of the community toward its own history. Dikovic spoke briefly and described the monument as a warning.

“Let this monument be a symbol of our respect for the victims, a symbol and a reminder that we must not forget them and that they must enter the history of Serbia”

Why is this brigade’s archive contested?

The unit honored in Raska has spent two years at the center of one of the hardest technical disputes between Belgrade and Pristina. Kosovo’s prime minister Albin Kurti announced in July 2024 that a formal request had been filed for access to the archive of the 37th Motorized Brigade, citing the agreement on missing persons reached in Brussels on May 2, 2024.

The demand returned in June, when the Kosovo delegation to the Joint Commission on Missing Persons listed access to that archive as one of two priorities, alongside excavations at Batajnica. Kushtrim Gara, head of the missing persons unit in the Kosovo prime minister’s office, called opening the archive a test of Serbia’s willingness.

The Humanitarian Law Center says the brigade’s records were classified by Bratislav Gasic during his term as defense minister, cutting off access to documents that could establish the circumstances of war crimes. Belgrade answers that the war was defensive and that the unit acted within the law.

Rudnica and Mala Kaludra, the same corner of Serbia

Raska is not an incidental location in this argument. Searches for suspected gravesites in the area have been running since 2013, and 52 victims were identified at Rudnica. The Humanitarian Law Center argues that the documentation points to bodies being removed from crime scenes and concealed inside Serbia, while the Serbian side maintains that the findings support no such conclusion.

In nearby Mala Kaludra, Pristina’s institutions are carrying out an exhumation in search of what they believe are the remains of 23 Albanians killed in Mitrovica. That work is under way in the same municipality where the monument was unveiled this weekend.

What stays unresolved

The declassification request has not been withdrawn and will come back before the Joint Commission on Missing Persons. Belgrade has announced no decision on whether, or how far, it will open the 37th Brigade’s files, so the stone in Raska now stands next to an unanswered question about the same unit’s paperwork.

Close to a thousand Serbian police officers were killed during the conflict in Kosovo. Their names, and those of soldiers from the villages around Raska, are now carved outside a school while the fate of the brigade’s archive is still being negotiated.