Blakaj: No evidence was required during the war damage census, something that didn’t exist could have been included

It is impossible to reliably register the amount of war damage and the buildings destroyed during the war in Kosovo during the population registration process, and during the census, people may have reported something that did not exist, Bekim Blakaj from the Humanitarian Law Center says, commenting on the results of the census in Kosovo, which showed that households reported war damage exceeding five billion euros.

Blakaj points out that Albanians lived in large families, which were divided after the war, and it is very likely that multiple members of one family reported the same building as war damage, which means that some reported amounts may have been duplicated.

"Also, people could have reported something arbitrarily if they were not asked for any confirmation or any documentary evidence, and as far as I know, this was not required in this process, so people could have reported something that didn’t exist. For this reason, such damage should be registered by a special commission that would be well-trained and authorized to request documentation on the basis of which the war damage could then be roughly determined," Blakaj says.

Given that 25 years have passed since the conflict, our interlocutor says that it is certainly not possible to provide evidence of the damage for every destroyed building.

When asked whether the data obtained from the census on war damage should be expected to be used as pressure on Belgrade, Blakaj says that remains to be seen.

"But most likely, politicians will refer to the data published by the Statistical Agency after the population registration," he believes.