26 Years Since NATO’s Intervention, Kosovo’s Albanian Women Still Search for Their Loved Ones

The walls of Luljeta Sharani’s house in Gjakova’s Çabrati neighbourhood in Kosovo have remained the same for 26 years, yet it no longer feels like home. The front yard, simple yet vibrant, was once a place where her family spent warm afternoons together, drinking tea with neighbors. The backyard was once shared with her husband’s family, who visited often. It wasn’t a big home, but it was theirs. 

Now, it is mostly quiet. Inside Sharani’s home, the walls are covered with photographs of her husband, Skyfter, and their three children — two sons, Valon (21) and Visar (20), and a daughter, Arjeta (15). Her husband and sons were killed by Serbian forces on May 10, 1999. 

“I live to tell,” she told More to Her Story, her voice strong but laden with sadness.

The Kosovo War, which took place from 1998 to 1999, stemmed from long-standing ethnic and political tensions between Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population and the Serbian government. The conflict escalated when the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) launched an armed insurgency seeking independence, prompting a military response from Serbian and Yugoslav forces. Reports of human rights abuses and violence against ethnic Albanians, along with accusations of ethnic cleansing, led to international concern. On March 24, 1999, NATO launched an air campaign against Yugoslav military targets, marking NATO’s first military intervention without United Nations Security Council approval.

On the ground in Kosovo, however, the human impact was devastating. Many Albanians were forcibly displaced, and thousands more were killed. But the Sharani family chose to stay, unwilling to abandon their home.

On May 9, 1999, at 5 p.m., Serbian soldiers stormed into Sharani’s home, where her husband, children, three brothers-in-law, their families, and her mother-in-law were gathered. The soldiers forced everyone to the ground, questioning each family member one by one. Luljeta, fearing the worst, lay between her two sons, Valon and Visar, whispering silent prayers and hoping they would survive the night.

She remembers the soldiers asking a series of “provocative questions.” They inquired about the KLA and other things Luljeta didn’t fully understand. She remembers one soldier asking her, “Do you love your children?” to which she responded, “Yes, like any mother in this world.” 

Another of the soldiers told her, “We will not hurt you, and you don’t have to be afraid of us.”

Yet her fear only deepened.

It was just before midnight when the soldiers left, only to return later with Sharani’s neighbors. Three families, the Nuzamala, Sahatqiu, and Berisha families, stayed the night together in the Sharani’s basement, not knowing what would come next.

The soldiers assured them, “You don’t have to be afraid, nothing will happen to you, but if even one of you tries to leave, we will kill you all.”

That night was the most terrifying night of Sharani’s life. Around 4 a.m., as she watched her sons sitting on the stairs, she pleaded with her husband to escape. But deep down, she knew it was impossible.

"He told me, ‘If they are going to kill me, I’d rather die in my own home than on the street,’" said Sharani. Now, she says that she remembers her sons' faces every time she looks at her basement stairs.

In the early morning of May 10, 1999, the sound of heavy noise outside their home reached everyone’s ears, signaling that authorities had returned.

“They weren’t the same ones from the night before. This time, they wore blue uniforms,” indicating the authorities who entered her home that morning were likely police officers and not soldiers.

Sharani remembers how the basement fell into silence. Everyone felt that something terrible was about to happen. 

“I kept telling [my sons] to hide, but Valon looked at me and asked, 'Where? We have nowhere to go.' I felt helpless because, truly, I didn’t know where to tell them to hide,” she said.

Then, the soldiers came down to the basement and separated the women and children from the men. Sharani doesn’t remember if she looked at her sons and husband one last time, but she does remember crying and telling her daughter, “I want to go back. I can't live without them.”

Eleven men, including Luljeta's husband, sons, extended family, and neighbours, were killed in Sharani’s yard that day.

The war in Kosovo ended one month later, in June 1999, following 78 days of NATO airstrikes and the signing of the Kumanovo Agreement, which led to the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces. For many, it marked the arrival of peace, but for Sharani and countless other Albanian families, it signified the beginning of a new battle — the search for missing loved ones.

“I didn’t want to accept the truth. I kept hoping they were alive,” Sharani told More to Her Story.

The Sharani family was one among countless families who were victims of widespread government crimes during the war — crimes that could only come to light years later. In 2001, a Serbian Interior Ministry working group uncovered evidence of Albanian bodies hidden in unmarked mass graves inside Serbia. But the full extent of the cover-up only emerged later. In 2022, the Humanitarian Law Center of Kosovo reported that the Serbian government had known all along. As early as March 1999, President Slobodan Milošević had allegedly ordered Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljković to erase the evidence.

Multiple testimonies later exposed the grim details of these cover-up operations. In the 2000s, witnesses at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia exposed how multiple perpetrators hid Kosovo Albanian victims’ bodies in multiple mass graves.

One such grave, which was discovered in 2001 in a neighborhood in Belgrade, Serbia, contained the remains of 744 Albanians from Kosovo. It contained the bodies of Sharani’s brother-in-law, Tahir, as well as her husband and his two brothers, Mentor and Isuf.

The pain was immense, but at least they finally had a grave to honour them.

Her worry for her two missing sons, however, never stopped. Their fate remained unknown until eight years after the war, on January 15, 2007, the day that would have been her son Visar’s 28th birthday. On this day, Sharani learned that both of her sons would return to her in coffins.

To this day, no one has been held accountable for the killings committed in the Sharani family’s yard.

Kosovo still does not have a public database for missing persons. However, for the first time, the 2024 population census by the Kosovo Agency of Statistics included a category recognizing those affected by the war. According to the agency, between February 28, 1998, and June 11, 1999, as a result of the war in Kosovo, 11,417 people were killed, and 1,407 others are still missing.

However, the Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo (HLCK) has a different number of missing persons. The Executive Director of HLCK, Bekim Blakaj, who has been working on this issue for the past 26 years, states that the number of missing persons is closer to 1,600. HLCK has recorded the number of those killed from January 1, 1998, to December 31, 2000.

Blakaj explained the technical difficulties in identifying bodies, which contribute to the discrepancies in the numbers reported by different institutions regarding the missing persons.

“In the beginning, families believed their loved ones were still alive, held in secret prisons. I remember interviewing Luljeta [Sharani]—she simply could not accept that her family members were dead,” Blakaj told More to Her Story.

The normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia is ongoing. The Kosovo-Serbia dialogue began in 2011, following Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, and has been facilitated by the European Union.

The European Union has facilitated the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue since 2011, following Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008.

Both sides have agreed on several issues as part of the negotiations. In 2023, during talks in Ohrid, North Macedonia, Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti and Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić verbally agreed to work toward normalizing relations. But no signatures followed, and no one knows if the promises will ever translate into action.

One of those promises was the Declaration on Missing Persons, an agreement to identify burial sites and excavate remains—a step meant to bring closure to families still searching for loved ones.

However, two years later, neither country has taken concrete action.