UNMIK/PR/230
PRISTINA-Ambassadors of the eight-member United Nations Security Council mission to Kosovo completed their tour yesterday with visits to Gnjilane and Djakovica in eastern and central Kosovo.
The delegation gave a farewell press briefing last evening and departed Kosovo this morning.
In Djakovica, a region which saw major fighting and destruction during the war, the delegation viewed operations of the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and of the Victims Recovery and Identification Commission, formed by UNMIK. On 28 April, ICTY investigators began the exhumation of bodies buried in Brekoc cemetery, whom residents claim were killed by Serb security forces. ICTY representatives told the delegation they hoped to complete assessment of some 300 war-related grave sites in Kosovo this year.
The Security Council delegation then met with families of the area's missing and detained people--the largest numbers of any region in Kosovo, estimated at some 1,500. The ambassadors also met with members of the Djakovica municipal council and administrative board.
SRSG Bernard Kouchner told the delegation that the issue of the missing and detained was undermining the process of building co-existence, confidence and reconciliation.
In Gnjilane, the group visited a newly opened registatrion site in the village of Dobrcane, a mixed Kosovo Albanian and Turkish village.
Registration officials--UN Volunteers, local staff and UNMIK and OSCE international staff--were assisting a long line of residents, and reported that 80 people showed up to be registered on the first day.
Registration of Kosovo's population began in 25 sites on 28 April and is expected to take three months. Up to 400 fixed and mobile stations will operate across Kosovo, with voters' registration also going on in Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, and by mail in 32 other countries.
The group then toured the Gnjilane area and met with Serb religious and community leaders at the main Orthodox Church in a town where the Serb population has shrunk from 12,000 to 800 since the end of the war in June.
Serb community leaders said that while they believed registration of all the population was important, they were unable to advise their followers to participate, pending concrete signs of local Serbs beginning to return home.
Ambassador Anwarul Karim Chowdhury, the delegation leader, expressed the group's "pain and full sympathy" at the news that an Orthodox church in Vitina had been destroyed by a bomb on Orthodox Good Friday, 28 April.
"Destruction or desecration of any place of religion is absolutely reprehensible," he said. "We believe all communities should live peacefully and without violence. Everyone must make their own effort."
Back in Pristina, the delegation was briefed by UNMIK Police Commissioner Sven Fredericksen, who described the needs of his 3,130 international officers for more specialized personnel and equipment, as UNMIK is for most UN police officers their first "full-scale law enforcement mission."
Fredericksen noted that the crime rate in Kosovo remained too high, but not at a level unusual in a post-war situation. UNMIK Police have made progress in controlling crime, he said, having made, for example, 47 arrests for 101 murders committed in Kosovo since January 2000.
Several Kosovo and international co-heads of the newly formed administrative departments described the progress in the Kosovo judiciary, penal system, health care system, Central Fiscal Authority, agriculture and sports fields and in "democratization and civil society."
The court system, for example, while functioning with 277 Kosovo judges and prosecutors appointed in January, is to be bolstered by international judges and a Kosovo War and Ethnic Crimes Court, which will handle cases deemed too sensitive for district or municipal courts, judiciary officials said.