UNMIK/PR/763
SRSG Michael Steiner visited the UNMIK mortuary at Orahovac/Rahovec today as part of a tour of the greater Prizren region.
There he viewed forensics work ongoing with remains found in the nearby region by a team of international pathologists, anthropologists and other experts provided through the Centre for International Forensics assistance.
The new morgue was opened in May 2002 under the direction of the Office on Missing Persons in the UNMIK Department of Justice. It can examine about 20 bodies per day and is focusing on cases of missing persons from 1998 to 2000.
SRSG Michael Steiner stressed after the visit that local experts must join the facility: “We need to Kosovarize this,” he said. “It’s a great chance to learn with these international experts.”
However he said the main outcome of the visit was confirmation of the important role that families of the missing must play in the process of identifying the missing. The forensics experts rely on information given by families to complement the information they produce from their examinations.
The new director of the Office on Missing Persons, Jose Pablo Baraybar, said that the morgue planned on finishing the exhumations of all the dead buried in the western Kosovo region. It is also to be a training facility for the permanent Medical Examiners Office to be built in Fushe Kosovo/Kosovo Polje.
Asked about the existence of hidden prisons, SRSG Michael Steiner said, “We have no information, but we have set up the mechanisms to verify reliable information. This must be a joint effort of families from Serbia and Kosovo…..The families must understand that it is sad, but we are forced to be realistic and place our emphasis on the inspection of bodies.”
The SRSG went on to visit the huge Rahovec/Orahovac Winery, said to be among the largest in the world, but plagued by an outmoded management structure as a socially owned enterprise set up under a legal framework from 1989. The complex is indebted to workers, utilities and the European Agency for Reconstruction, and management complained of problems inhibiting the export of some 50 million liters of wine.
“To raise productivity, you need mechanical preconditions and the willingness of the wine producers,” SRSG Michael Steiner told managers of the complex. “You need highly professional management to compete in the Europe and to exploit this treasure of the region.”
Orahovac Municipal Administrator Anthony Thompson said an advisory board was needed to help management become accountable and transparent, develop a strategy and improve exports. This will be possible under the new Kosovo Trust Agency regulation, he said, although actual privatization may be difficult for such a huge complex.
The SRSG went on to Velika Hoca, home to about 700 Kosovo Serbs, where he learned of their isolation, water shortage and lack of access to a dentist. Widespread unemployment has exacerbated these problems, residents told him.
With local leaders, he discussed the two pillars of multiethnicity and integration upon which he has said a new Kosovo must be built. “Yes, Albanians have to accept that Kosovo does not belong to Albanians only, but to all its inhabitants, and it must be a multiethnic society. But the smaller communities, the Serbs, have to accept that they must integrate into the multiethnic society.”
The SRSG concluded that some slow progress has been made in this direction, and that he would investigate solutions for the water and dentist problems.
From Velika Hoca he was to travel to Dragash and Prizren.
