The village of Krusha e Vogel is tucked away in the south western part of Kosovo, and was the scene of one of the worst massacres of the Kosovo war. In March 1999, the Serbian military rounded up its inhabitants. The women and children were told to go to Albania or be killed. Nearly all of the men were executed. After the war, the women returned to find their male family members dead and their village razed to the ground.
With great difficulty, the women rebuilt the village and learned how to do the agricultural work previously done by their men. In a country where less than 10 percent of women are the heads of their families, these women support their dependants and run their own affairs. No perpetrators of the massacre have been brought to justice.
Imagine how these women must have felt in August this year, when a forensic team staffed by the EU’s rule of law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, and Kosovo’s Department of Forensic Medicine showed up to the village unannounced and started digging up the graves of three family members killed during the war. The bodies had been misidentified, and the forensic team brought the allegedly accurate remains with them, without asking for permission to replace the remains in the first place.
