About two-and-a-half years after Kosovo’s premier Albin Kurti and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic agreed to a declaration on missing persons in May 2023, the two countries took the main step towards implementing this declaration: the establishment of a Joint Commission on Missing Persons.

The move raises hopes that more of the 1,600 people still missing from the 1998-99 Kosovo war may be found, as efforts to find missing persons’ remains have stalled in recent years due to lack of information about burial sites. Most of the missing are Kosovo Albanians, but also some Serbs.

“The objective of the Joint Commission is to oversee the implementation of the Declaration on Missing Persons, which aims to contribute to shedding light on the fate of the remaining missing persons, which includes persons forcibly disappeared, provide closure to their families and foster lasting reconciliation and peace,” the EU Special Representative for the Belgrade Pristina Dialogue, Peter Sorensen, said in a statement on Friday.

Sorenson explained that the long-delayed Joint Commission will support efforts by a missing persons working group chaired by the International Committee of the Red Cross. It will help facilitate searches and resolve any disagreements, he added.

The search for the remaining missing persons is a key element in the ongoing Belgrade-Pristina dialogue process to normalise relations, conducted in Brussels since 2013.

Kosovo’s acting deputy prime minister and chief negotiator in the dialogue process, Besnik Bislimi, expressed satisfaction about the outcome of the latest talks with Serbian negotiators on Thursday.

“The meetings were successful and at the end we reached the conclusion of realising this objective,” Bislimi said.

Serbian lead negotiator Petar Petkovic, director of the Serbian government office for Kosovo, said the agreement was “extremely important and significant”.

“I hope that we are now giving additional hope to all the families who are still waiting to find out the truth about the fate of their loved ones,” Petkovic said after the meeting.

The trilateral meeting yielded results after several years of failure to implement a normalisation of relations deal agreed by Kurti and Vucic in February 2023, followed by an implementation annex one month later.