The registrar’s office at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals has said that it will listen in on Radovan Karadzic’s telephone calls for several days because he addressed a public debate in Montenegro by phone from the UN Detention Unit in the Netherlands. The registrar’s decision said that the commanding officer of the Detention Unit had not given Karadzic permission to use its communication facilities “to publicly spread information in any form.”

Hundreds of relatives of victims gathered at a memorial to the 54 ethnic Albanian civilians killed by Serbian forces in the village of Poklek to mark the 20th anniversary of the massacre. The head of the Kosovo Assembly, Kadri Veseli, laid flowers at the memorial and lamented that the killers have not been prosecuted. “Many things can be forgotten and forgiven in a human life, but we will never forget Serbia’s massacres in Kosovo. We will never forgive them,” he said.

Vasfije Krasniqi Goodman made an emotional appeal for justice in the courtyard of an abandoned house where she was raped by Serbian policemen when she was 16 years old in 1999. “In this place, my childhood dreams vanished,” said Krasniqi Goodman, who last year became the first woman in Kosovo to speak out publicly about being raped during the war, even though the subject remains taboo in the country.

In the last 20 years, governments in the Western Balkans have accounted for more than 70 percent of the 40,000 people who were missing at the end of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Almost 28,000 have been accounted for, which is an unprecedented achievement following a large-scale conflict anywhere in the world. The high proportion of people who have been accounted for shows clearly that the missing persons process, adopted in the Western Balkans and spearheaded by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), works.