The crimes were not the same. The debt is.
the Editorial Board | 13 August 2026
Twenty-three years ago today, on the banks of the Lumbardhi i Pejës (Bistrica) at Gorazhdec (Goraždevac), twenty-eight children and young people were swimming through an August afternoon when someone opened fire on them from cover. UNMIK's investigators counted 87 rounds. Ivan Jovović, nineteen, died at the river. Pantelija Dakić, twelve, died in hospital. Four more children carried away wounds, some for life.
No one has ever been charged. No one has even been named.
The promises came at full volume. UNMIK's police commissioner pledged within days to leave no stone unturned; the head of the mission repeated it within weeks. Seven years later EULEX closed the file, telling the families that "all investigative leads have been exhausted." In 2018 the folder passed, unresolved, into the archive of Kosovo's own judiciary, where it sits today. A survivor, wounded at thirteen, still asks: "I wonder where they were that day, why no one protected us."
We claim this anniversary, and everything it stands in for. The harvesters of Grackë e Vjetër (Staro Gracko), cut down in their wheat in July 1999. The passengers of the Niš Express, blown apart near Livadicë (Livadice) in 2001. The Stolić family of Obiliq (Obilić), killed in their house in 2003. The children in the river. These were crimes against citizens of this country, committed after 10 June 1999, under the peace, and no motive justifies a single one of them. Revenge least of all. The crimes of the Milošević regime were monstrous, and monstrousness confers no license. Nor do we equate. Serbia's crimes here were a state's work, planned in ministries and executed down chains of command; the river was murder from cover by men no state has ever claimed. History weighs the two differently, and should. The dead cannot be weighed.
It would be convenient to dwell on the file's critical years in international hands, under an administration that ran police and courts and answered to no one here. That is true, and it is not enough. The Republic we proclaimed in 2008 declared itself the state of all its citizens, and a state of all its citizens claims all of its dead. The file is ours now. So is the obligation.
The blade of antagonism cuts on both sides of the border. Start with ours. Our institutions, as far as we can establish, have never marked this day. Until today, neither had we. We correct that here, and we ask our prosecutors to correct the rest: the folder marked 13 August 2003 sits in our archive, waiting for our hand. Reopening it indicts no ministry of ours.
Belgrade marks the day every year, in statements that convert two boys into ammunition against a whole people. The same state prosecuted a man for pointing to a grave at Kaludra, because its files have chains of command inside them, and its calendar has yet to find room for an Albanian child. Grief deployed as a weapon honors no one buried. If Belgrade's grief for Gorazhdec is more than ammunition, its archives on the graves and the missing can open tomorrow. None of it absolves us. Justice for the Albanian dead and justice for the Serbian dead is one cause, pursued under the same guiding principle, or it is not justice at all.
If we mean the European future we keep invoking, it begins there. The river at Gorazhdec runs low in August, the way it did that afternoon. Children still swim in it. They should grow up in a Republic able to tell every one of them, in whatever language they dream in, that when one of them bleeds, the state does not first ask what name they carry.
