Serbia unveiled a monument to the 37th Motorized Brigade in the municipality where its victims were hidden. The stone commemorates the brigade. Its silence commemorates a state policy.
By Fatos Kabashi and Drizan Shala | 2 August 2026
On the first of August, on the plateau in front of the elementary school in Raška, Serbia unveiled and consecrated a monument to the 37th Motorized Brigade of the Yugoslav Army. The stone is inscribed to sixty members of the brigade killed in 1999, three missing, and 186 wounded. The ceremony was organized on the initiative of the brigade's veterans' association with the support of the local self-government, and the state adopted it whole: Serbia's Interior Ministry issued the press release, and Serbia's deputy prime minister and interior minister, Ivica Dačić, delivered the principal address. The brigade's wartime commander, Ljubiša Diković, who went on to head the General Staff of the Serbian Army for seven years, spoke as well. He said the unit had ranked itself among the most glorious in history, and asked that the monument stand as a symbol of respect for the victims. He meant the brigade's own.
Dačić said the fighters of 1999 were freedom fighters and war heroes, not war criminals. He said the monument's placement carried a special symbolism, because children will pass it every day on their way into the school, and it will be for them a silent teacher of history.
We agree with Serbia's deputy prime minister on one point. The placement carries a special symbolism. Raška is the municipality of Rudnica.
The abandoned quarry near the village of Rudnica sits in Raška municipality, near the Jarinjë crossing. The site had been examined repeatedly since 2007. On 13 December 2013 the first human remains were found there, and in excavations that ran until 22 August 2014, conducted with forensic experts of the ICMP, the ICTY and Kosovo's missing persons office, 52 bodies were recovered. All 52 were Albanian civilians from Kosovo, aged from 14 to 87, killed in the spring of 1999 in villages of Drenica. Drenica was the zone of responsibility of the 37th Motorized Brigade. The bodies had been taken from where the brigade operated, driven out of Kosovo, and hidden in a quarry in the municipality that has now raised the brigade's monument. The men who unveiled the stone did not travel toward the brigade's history. They traveled toward the grave.
What happened in that zone of responsibility is not a matter of allegation traded between Prishtina and Belgrade. It is a matter of documents, most of them Serbian.
The Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, the organization founded by Nataša Kandić, has described the brigade's zone in four dossiers published between 2012 and 2017, built on military orders and combat reports bearing the commander's signature, on the military and police records held in the Hague Tribunal's database, and on witness testimony taken over two decades. The dossiers document killings, rape, looting and expulsion of Albanian civilians at ten locations: Çikatova e Vjetër (Staro Čikatovo), Qirez (Ćirez), Baks, Izbica, Shavarina (Šavarine), Vërboc (Vrbovac), Studime e Poshtme (Donja Sudimlja), Rezalla (Rezala), Zabel i Ulët (Donji Zabelj) and Gllanasella (Gladno Selo). In the brigade's zone of responsibility, by the Center's accounting, around 1,400 Albanian civilians were killed and thousands more expelled.
The grain of the evidence varies by site, and we will keep the grain, because the grain is what makes the record unanswerable. At Izbica, on 28 March 1999, the Tribunal established in the Šainović judgment that at least 93 people were killed, most of them elderly men, separated from the women and children and shot in two groups. The Center's 2017 dossier on the concealment of bodies, citing paragraph 614 of the Đorđević trial judgment, records that the Izbica operation was a joint action of the army and the police in which the 35th and 85th detachments of the special police and the 37th Motorized Brigade participated. At Rezalla, on 5 April 1999, at least 41 civilians were killed; here the Center states plainly that it is certain members of the brigade were the perpetrators. Twenty-seven of the Rezalla dead were later carried out of the quarry at Rudnica. At Çikatova e Vjetër, on 17 April, 27 civilians were killed; twenty of them were found at Rudnica. At the end of April the villages of Gllogoc and Skënderaj municipalities were encircled and shelled from about five in the morning; men held in the mosque at Qirez were loaded onto trucks on the first of May, driven to Shavarina, where 43 people had been shot a few hours earlier, taken down and executed in groups of ten. Ninety-nine of the dead there have been identified, 24 of them minors. Three of the mosque's prisoners survived.
Then there is the second operation, the one the monument does not commemorate because no army gives medals for it in public. Military documents show the brigade held responsibility for what the vocabulary of the time called clearing the battlefield. The brigade's clearing squad had a commander, Rade Krsmanović, and a deputy, Hasan Čorbić. The Đorđević judgment established what clearing meant that spring: from the second week of April 1999, on at least six occasions, trucks carrying the bodies of Albanians killed by Serbian forces arrived at a police training center at Batajnica outside Belgrade, with further deliveries to Petrovo Selo and bodies sunk at Lake Perućac; in 2001, 744 individuals were exhumed at Batajnica, 61 at Petrovo Selo and 84 at Perućac; and the Tribunal found the transports were a coordinated operation to remove the evidence of crimes. The dead of Drenica took the shorter route, to Rudnica. And at Izbica the operation ran in reverse: in June 1999, before international forces reached the site, the graves the survivors had dug were opened by Serbian personnel, the bodies examined by Serbian experts and trucked away. Izbica was killed twice on paper. Once in the meadow, once in the ledger.
Against that record, we can now write the state's own chronology, because every entry in it is a public act.
In December 2011, Serbia appointed the brigade's wartime commander Chief of the General Staff. In January 2012, the Humanitarian Law Center published its dossier on him. Within 48 hours, during which members of the executive had already pronounced the findings untrue and monstrous, the War Crimes Prosecutor's Office announced there was no basis to suspect the general's criminal responsibility. Two days is the period Serbia's institutions required to investigate seven documented crimes and more than 450 dead.
In December 2013 the ground at Rudnica produced its first remains, and by August 2014 its fifty-two. According to the Center, the prosecution had held information since 2010 that the bodies at Rudnica had been transferred from primary graves in Drenica. In January 2015 the Center published the Rudnica dossier. The following month, Serbia's president decorated the general with the Order of the White Eagle. The same year, Serbia's then defense minister, Bratislav Gašić, declared the entire archive of the disbanded brigade command a state secret. In 2016, a Belgrade court ordered the Humanitarian Law Center to pay the general 550,000 dinars for the damage the documentation had done to his reputation, and declined to pause the case until the prosecution finished its preliminary examination of Rezalla, opened after the Center filed a criminal complaint against the general and three soldiers. In September 2018 the general retired with the Order of Karađorđe's Star, first class, and with the assurance of Serbia's head of state that he had always stood by him against those who accused him falsely and wished to brand his forehead with shame.
In July 2024, under the Declaration on Missing Persons agreed in Brussels, Kosovo formally requested that Serbia open the brigade's archive. In June of this year, the Joint Commission on Missing Persons named access to that archive as one of its two priorities, and the head of the missing persons unit in Kosovo's government called it a test of Serbia's readiness to implement the Declaration. The archive remains sealed. On 28 July, the ground at Kaludra e Vogël (Mala Kaludra), across the boundary of the brigade's old zone, began answering questions the archive will not, on the first day anyone dug. On 30 July, the Humanitarian Law Center noted that verifying the information about that grave had taken more than two decades. On 31 July, as we wrote this week, Serbia charged a man from Kraljevo whose alleged offense was telling Kosovo's institutions where the dead lay. On 1 August, the deputy prime minister unveiled the monument.
Now the arithmetic, which is the whole of our argument. In the twenty-seven years since the spring of 1999, in relation to the most thoroughly documented formation of the Kosovo war, the institutions of Serbia have produced two public clearances of its commander, one classification order covering its entire archive, one defamation judgment against the organization that documented its record, two of the state's highest decorations, and, as of this week, one monument. They have produced no indictment. Not for Izbica, not for Rezalla, not for Qirez and Shavarina, not for any of the ten locations, and not for the operation that moved the dead. The Center states it has no information that an investigation was ever opened, or that the clearing squad's commander, his deputy, or the officer above them was ever questioned.
This is why Dačić's sentence at the schoolyard, that Serbia's fighters were war heroes and not war criminals, is constructed the way it is. It is technically untested. No Serbian court has ever been asked to rule on the conduct of the brigade's members, because the prosecution whose job it was to ask spent twenty-seven years declining to. The Hague Tribunal tried the architecture of the operation and convicted the men who ran it from Belgrade. Trying the hands was Serbia's job. A sentence that survives only because their own prosecutors protected it from every court is not a verdict. It is a fortification.
The monument carries its own small mirror of this method. The stone names the brigade's three missing. We do not diminish them; a missing soldier is a grief like any other, and his family is owed an answer. But the state that carved those three names into granite is the same state that classifies the files which could shorten the list of 1,607 people still missing from the war it is memorializing, and that prosecutes, as espionage, the act of telling Kosovo where to dig. Serbia's missing are inscribed. Kosovo's are a state secret.
We make no claim about the calendar. We cannot document that the date of the unveiling was chosen with the excavators at Kaludra e Vogël in mind, and we will not assert what we cannot document. The claim we make is smaller and worse. The coincidence did not need to be planned. It only needed to be tolerated. The Serbian state watched the week assemble itself, the exhumation, the Center's statement, the espionage charge, and its own press placing the ceremony and the digging side by side, and its response was to send the second-ranking member of its government to stand in front of a school and call the record a slander. A government that engineers a provocation can at least be said to have noticed the dead. A government that no longer needs to engineer anything, because glorification has become routine administration, has stopped noticing them at all. That, and not the choice of a date, is what a state policy looks like. And it is the answer, delivered in granite, to every mediator who still files this under reconciliation pending: a candidate for membership of the European Union spent this week burying evidence in one municipality and unveiling marble over it in the same one.
The children of Raška will pass the stone each morning, as Serbia's deputy prime minister promised. He called it a silent teacher, and for once the description is exact. It is silent about Izbica, silent about Rezalla, silent about the mosque at Qirez, silent about the trucks, silent about the quarry twenty minutes down the road. The silence is not a flaw in the lesson. The silence is the lesson. And the archive that could interrupt it stays classified, so that the teacher is never contradicted in class.
