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<https://www.b92.net/eng/news/crimes.php?yyyy=2018&mm=08&dd=13&nav_id=104849>
Killers of Serb youths in Kosovo can't be found, 15 years on - CrimesEnglish
8-10 minutes
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This Monday marks 15 years since unknown persons opened fire from automatic
weapons on a group of Serb youths in Kosovo.
Source: B92, Tanjug Monday, August 13, 2018 | 14:25
(Getty Images, file, illustration purposes)
They were spending a summer day on the banks of the Bistrica River, near their
homes in the Serb enclave of Gorazdevac - a village in the western part of
Kosovo.
19-year-old Ivan Jovovic, and 12-year-old Pantelija Dakic were killed in the
attack.
This crime that remains unsolved to this day - and that ranks among the four
gravest acts of violence committed against Serb civilians in Kosovo since the
arrival of international forces in the province after 1999 - also left
20-year-old Djordje Ugrenovic, 14-year-old Bogdan Bukumirovic, 12-year-old
Marko Bogdanovic, and 13-year-old Dragana Srbljak seriously injured.
"Any kind of normalization between Serbs and Albanians and Belgrade and
Pristina cannot be built on forgetting the mass and organized crimes committed
by members of the so-called KLA ('Kosovo Liberation Army'), and without truth
and justice for the numerous Serb victims in Kosovo and Metohija," the Serb
Coordination said in a press release issued on the anniversary of the crime -
referring to the KLA - a now ethnic Albanian armed formation which Serbia
considers to be a terrorist organization.
The Serb Coordination added that in the intervening 15 years since the
Gorazdevac massacre, nobody has been brought to justice - while an EULEX (EU
rule of law mission in Kosovo) prosecutor said in 2010 that the investigation
had been halted "due to lack of evidence."
"This has perpetuated the anti-civilizational practice of impunity for the
crimes committed against Serbs in Kosovo, with no prospect of it changing it
for the foreseeable future," said the Serb Coordination, which gathers Serb
associations representing the families of the murdered, killed, and missing
Serbs from the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia.
The organization also publicly called on "international factors" in Kosovo, and
Serbia's authorities, to do all they can to bring to justice the perpetrators
of this, and all other crimes committed against Serbs in Kosovo.
The anniversary of the crime, meanwhile, will be marked in Belgrade, and in
Gorazdevac.
In 2001, EULEX halted its investigation - during which the police interviewed
75 witnesses and searched 100 houses - due to lack of evidence.
The parents of Ivan Jovovic and Pantelija Dakic have been expressing their
disappointment each year by fact the killers of their children had not been
found - adding that this was the case despite the perpetrators' names being in
fact "known."
The killers remain free to this day despite the head of the UN mission in
Kosovo (UNMIK) police promising at the time to "leave no stone unturned" in a
bid to find them.
UNMIK offering a one-million-euro money reward did not help, either.
In the wake of the attack, the UN Security Council held an urgent session.
The Gorazdevac massacre ranks among the most serious crimes committed against
Serb civilians in Kosovo after the 1999 war.
Other incidents include the killing of 14 Serb farmers in Staro Gracko, the
murder of the three-member Stolic family in Obilic, a town near Pristina, and
the attack on a Nis Express bus near Podujevo, that killed 12 Serb passengers
who were on their way to visit the graves of their loved ones on an Orthodox
Christian holiday.
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