Belgrade's official narrative intentionally erases Albanian victims. The EU accession process allows this erasure to solidify in fact.
Written by: Albatros Rexhaj
Twenty-seven years after Serbian forces expelled almost a million Albanians from Kosovo, burning villages, executing civilians and filling mass graves that would later be discovered on Serbian territory, Belgrade held a memorial. Officials gathered in Vranje. President Vučić spoke of innocent victims. Foreign Minister Marko Đurić posted statistics on social media: 14.000 bombs, 89 children killed. The Commissariat for Refugees and Migration issued an official statement on the displacement.
In none of these words, across all these officials and institutions, was any Albanian mentioned.
None.
We must be precise about what this silence is about. It is not an omission. It is not the natural contraction of the official language. It is the product of a system that has decided, with consistency across decades and institutions, that Albanian suffering does not qualify as suffering. That Albanian dead do not qualify as dead. That almost a million people driven from their homes at gunpoint occupy, in Belgrade’s moral worldview, the same category as the weather: a phenomenon, not a crime; a fact of the landscape, not something done to human beings by other human beings.
This is not a relic from 1999. It is the operating premise of 2026.
The most illuminating document of this commemoration is not Vučić’s speech. It is the official statement of the Commissariat for Refugees and Migration, a state institution whose legal mandate is to protect displaced persons. For the 27th anniversary, the Commissariat issued a cautious, bureaucratically correct statement on displacement. It noted that a large number of people from Kosovo and Metohija were forced to flee during the bombing. It noted the approximately 200.000 internally displaced persons registered in Serbia today. It concluded with a commitment to human rights, dialogue, and the UN Charter.
The nearly one million Albanians displaced from Kosovo in 1999, the largest forced population displacement in Europe since World War II, appear nowhere in this document.
A state body tasked with counting displaced persons counted the displaced persons it chose to see and left others out. This is not a mistake. It is politics. And politics reflects belief. The belief, nurtured and enforced by Serbian institutions over 27 years and multiple governments, is that Albanians do not fully belong to the category of persons whose displacement constitutes an evil. They are, in this calculation, removals from a Serbian history, not protagonists of their own history.
This isn't memory. It's engineering.
You don't need a law to say that Albanians are less people. You just need a Commissariat that writes about displacement without mentioning them. You just need a Foreign Minister who posts about victims without including them. Repeat this across enough institutions, over enough years, and it becomes the tacit premise of an entire political culture. This is what Belgrade has built. This is what Belgrade is still building.
Foreign Minister Đurić’s post was addressed, in English, to a transatlantic audience. This matters. He was not addressing an inner circle that already shares this belief. He was making an argument, in the language of international law and humanitarian concern, for readers in Washington and Brussels who may not know that the argument rests on a foundation of systematic erasure. The way the argument is constructed, that NATO imposed an example of illegitimate force that has poisoned the international order ever since, is designed to resonate at a moment when the policy of intervention is under pressure and the legitimacy of the 1990s settlement is openly questioned.
On the surface, it is a well-held argument. It collapses the moment Albanians are allowed into it. The intervention came after years of documented atrocities, a 1998 military offensive that displaced hundreds of thousands before any NATO aircraft had crossed Serbian airspace, massacres in Recak, Kruše e Madhe, and Izbica, and a systematic campaign whose evidence fills the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Whatever judgment is reached on the legality of the intervention, the sequence of events that produced it is not historically disputed.
Belgrade's commemoration works by erasing that sequence. It starts the clock on March 24, 1999, and counts forward. Everything before that date, in this narrative, is silence.
Vučić drew a direct line from 1999 to the present, arguing that every subsequent violation of international law stems from that night. The argument is carefully constructed. But it is constructed by the president of a country whose forces filled mass graves in Kosovo, whose predecessor was accused of crimes against humanity, and whose institutions cannot bring themselves to write the word Albanian in a document on displacement. The courage is not incidental to the project. It is the project. To stand long enough and loudly enough at the victim’s podium is to make the original crime disappear.
Milorad Dodik stood on that platform. His presence was not ceremonial. Dodik is currently under US sanctions for destabilizing Bosnia, and his active political project is the dissolution of a state built on the ruins of a genocide that his own entity committed. The axis that gathered in Vranje is not a coalition of the injured. It is a coalition of the unaccounted for, and it is actively at work.
There is another party that should be named here. The European Union has granted Serbia candidate status. It negotiates with Belgrade across 35 accession chapters. It finances Serbian institutions. It issues progress reports, expresses concern, calls for dialogue, and continues the process.
Nowhere in the architecture of European enlargement policy is there a demand that Serbia account for what happened to Albanians in Kosovo. Nowhere is historical reckoning treated as a condition for membership. The EU membership framework requires judicial reform, border management, anti-corruption measures and harmonisation with the acquis. It does not require that a candidate country’s state institutions be able to recognise the full humanity of the people its forces expelled and killed.
The result is a process that accepts without conditions: a Serbia whose Foreign Minister erases Albanian victims from history on the anniversary of their expulsion; a Serbia whose state refugee agency produces displacement statistics that exclude the war’s largest displaced population; a Serbia whose president stands alongside a separatist under sanctions. And yet it remains, in Brussels’ official assessment, a country on the European path.
What this tolerance produces is not simply a moral contradiction. It creates a concrete negotiating environment in which Serbia bears no cost for maintaining the erasure. Belgrade continues to receive chapters, funding, and diplomatic legitimacy while its central historical claim, that it was the victim and Kosovo the pretext, goes unchallenged by the very institution that guides the accession process. With each passing year without that challenge, the claim hardens. It moves from political assertion to tacit premise to the basis from which future negotiations begin. The EU is not a passive observer of this process. By continuing unconditionally, it is a participant in it.
The EU cannot credibly present itself as the guardian of human rights and the dignity of victims while treating as a legitimate candidate a government that treats an entire people as if they were below the threshold of recognition. These two positions are not in tension. They are in contradiction. And the contradiction has a beneficiary.
For Kosovo, none of this is abstract. The erasure of Albanian suffering from Serbian memory politics is the foundation of a legal and political argument: that Kosovo’s separation from Serbia lacked legitimate cause, that its international recognition rests on a violation rather than a solution, and that the current order is therefore reversible. Any commemoration that excludes the Albanian dead advances that argument. Any statement by the Commissariat that counts only Serb displaced persons adds another layer of falsehood to the foundation of a future claim.
Belgrade is not preparing for a specific operation on a specific date. It is doing something more permanent: it is building, institution by institution and anniversary by anniversary, a historical reality in which what happened to Albanians did not happen, or did not matter, or did not happen to the people who matter. When the moment comes to take Kosovo back by force, the foundations will already be there.
Twenty-seven years ago, Serbian forces forced almost a million human beings from their homes. The bodies of the killed were loaded into refrigerated trucks and buried in mass graves on Serbian territory in an attempt to make them disappear. They did not disappear. But in Belgrade’s official memory, in speeches and bureaucratic statements and the foreign minister’s social media posts, the effort continues.
Belgrade has spent 27 years building a history without Albanians in it. Brussels has spent more than a decade financing, negotiating, and officially sealing the state that produces it. The names Belgrade refuses to pronounce are not lost. They are being hung on purpose, and Europe is offering the land.
Albatros Rexhaj is an author, playwright, and national security analyst with nearly three decades of experience in political and security affairs. He is a survivor of a Serbian execution squad in July 1998.
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