Dead Sons Haunt a Fragile Piece of Europe

Nesrete Kumnova has spent the last two decades looking for the body of her only son.

Twenty-two at the time and an aspiring pharmacist, Albion was snatched in his slippers on March 31, 1999, a week after NATO forces entered the war between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in the former Yugoslav province of Kosovo. There’s a picture of him in her office in the war-scarred town of Gjakova, opposite a floor-to-ceiling montage of photos of some of the 1,500 other people from the area missing or declared dead.