Week Three: Post-Conflict Property
What happens to abandoned property? It is a difficult enough legal question when the property is actually abandoned. What if the original owners were forced, sometimes at gun point, to leave their property behind?
These questions and more have been percolating in the Kosovo justice system for years now. Many of the local interns at the court were not actually born in Kosovo. I know people born in France, Turkey, Norway—the list goes on. Because of the war, their families became asylum seekers. Some of their mothers were already pregnant with them when they were forced from their homes. While Pristina bears many monuments to the war, in the country the property still bears visible scars of conflict. Property destroyed by mortars and ransacked, family gold stolen— everyplace and everyone has a story.
Not knowing what awaited them, the asylum seekers came home. Most of my coworkers don't remember the countries they were born in. Kosovo is there home, and there was never a question that their family would return as soon as possible. The United Nation Mission in Kosovo, the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, and many other international organizations and countries have tried to help mediate the property issues left behind by the conflict. In some cases people legitimately thought property was abandoned. In others they simply gambled that the original owners would never return. The courts at all levels of the Kosovo justice system have poured over the evidence, trying to find an answer. Years on from the conflict, the acrimony of the disputes keeps the past fresh in everyone's mind. A young justice system must reckon with the past to try and create an equitable and just jurisprudence.