Prekaz is not being relitigated as history. It is being used to deny Kosovo the sovereign authority to judge crimes committed on its own soil.
By Mark Gojcaj | 23 June 2026
Begin with the number, because it is the thing the denial is built to bury. Human Rights Watch recorded it in 1998, before the tribunals and before the diplomacy that would later find it convenient to look away. Of the dead buried at Prekaz that March, eighteen were women and ten were children sixteen or younger. The youngest was about seven. They were shelled and shot inside three houses in the Drenica valley over three days, from the fifth to the seventh of March, by the special police and special operations units of the Serbian state, firing from the hill of an ammunition factory five hundred meters away. That is the fact. It has not changed in twenty-eight years, and no credible body has ever found otherwise.
So watch what Belgrade does with it this month, because it is not what the headlines suggest. When the Special Prosecution of Kosovo announced that it would finally indict for the killing of the Jashari family, Sputnik answered that the hunt for Serbs continues, and RT Balkan reissued the old script of Jashari the terrorist and the family as a nest. The easy reading is that Russia and Serbia are relitigating 1998. They are not. They are doing something colder and more current. They are attacking the legitimacy of the court before it has filed a single page.
Read the word hunt for what it is. It does not contest the body count. It contests the standing of the prosecutor to count the bodies at all. The claim folded inside it is that this is not a judiciary applying law to a crime, it is an ethnic state persecuting an ethnic group, and that the proceeding is therefore illegitimate at its root no matter what the evidence shows. That is a far more aggressive move than denial of the past. Denial of the past is an argument about history. This is an argument about sovereignty, and the sovereignty it means to dissolve is Kosovo's. Every time Belgrade casts a Kosovo war-crimes indictment as ethnic persecution, it rehearses the position that Kosovo's courts are not real courts, that their prosecutions are not law but score-settling, and that the only legitimate forum is one in which Serbia is never the defendant. The denial of the crime and the denial of the state are a single operation.
It is worth being clear about why Belgrade has chosen to fight on the forum rather than on the facts. It fights on the forum because it would lose on the facts, and it knows this.
Take the only argument the historical denial has, which is the word terrorist, and follow it to the end. An antiterrorist operation is defined entirely by its target. The instant the dead include a seven-year-old, the label has two exits and both are fatal to it. Either the child was a combatant, which is obscene and which concedes that the operation drew no line between fighters and anyone else, the precise definition of the crime. Or the child was a civilian killed in the course of the operation, which concedes the killing of a protected person, which is again the crime. There is no third exit. Amnesty International closed the lawful-operation reading in 1998, concluding that the evidence pointed not to an effort to arrest armed men but to a decision to eliminate the suspects and their families, and finding that at one of the houses the people inside had effectively surrendered before they were killed. The human-shield story, the claim that Jashari executed relatives who wished to give up, has never been confirmed by Amnesty, by Human Rights Watch, by the OSCE, or by any judgment at The Hague. Its origin is documented and it indicts Belgrade rather than the dead. The only survivor inside the main house, Besarta Jashari, then ten years old, has said the police threatened her with a knife and ordered her to say that her uncle had killed those who wanted to surrender. The hostage line was never a finding. It was a script forced on a terrified child over the bodies of her family.
A state with that record does not want a courtroom. So it argues that the courtroom is illegitimate. And here the arrogance of the position becomes visible, because of when Belgrade has chosen to make it.
At this exact moment, days from a verdict, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers sits in The Hague trying Hashim Thaci and the wartime leadership of the Kosovo Liberation Army. That court exists because Kosovo accepted it. Pressed by its Western partners to answer for crimes attributed to its own side, Kosovo amended its constitution, seated a tribunal staffed by international judges, and delivered its founding generation of leaders into a dock from which some may not return. Whatever one concludes about that prosecution, observe what it represents. It is a state submitting to jurisdiction over its own war record.
Now place Serbia beside it. Belgrade is not submitting to anything. It is asserting, in advance and in public, that Kosovo's judiciary lacks the legitimacy to try a Serbian crime committed on Kosovo's soil against Kosovo's citizens. One state accepted a court built specifically to judge it. The other denies the standing of any court that would. That is the asymmetry, and it is not subtle. It is the difference between a country that has accepted the rule of law as a price of statehood and a country that treats the rule of law as an instrument to be honored only when it points away from Belgrade.
The West should find this intolerable, and its failure to find it intolerable is the second half of the indictment. In its long courtship of Belgrade, its determination to keep the dialogue alive and the region tidy on a map in Brussels, the international community has slowly recast the victim as a co-defendant. It built a tribunal to try the army that the Prekaz massacre created. It built nothing to try the massacre, even though the Hague tribunal's own Kosovo investigation began by examining it, and even though the command chain that ran the operation was mapped in the Milutinovic judgment and then left uncharged because that case was scoped to the deportations of 1999. Point at the two buildings. One was built. One was not. And now the same diplomacy that built only one of them sits quietly while Belgrade argues that the prosecutor reaching for the unbuilt one has no right to exist.
There is no peace without justice, and there is no reconciliation without the admission of responsibility for the crimes of the past. This is not sentiment. It is mechanism. A grievance is retired by one thing only, which is acknowledgment, and acknowledgment is the precise thing Belgrade refuses. A state that will not concede that it killed children, and that goes further and denies the authority of any court to ask whether it did, is not closing the conditions that produced the killing. It is preserving them. It is keeping the machinery in working order and offering the maintenance to Europe as a peace process.
So name the thing precisely. Serbia is not relitigating Prekaz. It is establishing, before the indictment is even filed, that no Kosovo institution holds the authority to call Prekaz a crime. That is the claim on the table. The eighteen women and the ten children are owed at least this much from the West that once understood the difference and acted on it: the refusal to let Belgrade decide which courts are permitted to remember them.
