Foundations of Kosovo’s parallel state
Personal and economic context for Yugoslavia’s collapse
By Besnik Pula | March 18, 2025
I vividly remember the summer day in 1991 when my father and I boarded a 3 a.m. bus from Prishtina to Belgrade, where we would catch our morning flight to JFK airport in New York City. A mix of excitement and anxiousness kept me from sleeping that night. The beige-colored bus, operated by the once renowned Tourist Kosova company, departed from the front of the Grand Hotel Prishtina, likely for the convenience of the rare foreign journalist or visitor who might have been staying there during those tumultuous years. Just weeks earlier, I had severely injured my ankle in a fall, so I limped from our apartment to the bus with my luggage. I bid my mother and my great aunt, who had graciously come out that morning to see us away, farewell, climbed onto the bus with my father, and we set off.
The journey to Belgrade was exceedingly long and sleep eluded me once again. Upon disembarking, the pain from my limp intensified as I had to drag both my luggage and my father’s, while he hurriedly sought a taxi to ensure that we didn’t miss our flight. Belgrade felt alien to me, a place I had last visited in my childhood, when Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia still existed.
By the summer of 1991, Belgrade had become a hub of bitter political turmoil, marked by Yugoslavia’s dissolution and the Slobodan Milošević’s dominance, making it an unwelcoming place for a young man from Kosovo. I was relieved when my father finally secured a taxi, allowing us to hasten to the airport.
Our JAT Yugoslav Airlines flight was delayed due to the lack of jet fuel at Belgrade airport, a result of the economic collapse Yugoslavia was undergoing at the time. The more-than-a-decade old DC-10 that operated the Belgrade-JFK route, needed to refuel elsewhere. After a lengthy delay, the pilot announced that we would be making an unscheduled stop in Amsterdam to refuel before continuing to JFK.
As I looked out below to the greenery and the mountains, I attempted to identify Slovenia, somewhat foolishly wondering if any signs of the conflict between the Slovenian forces and the Yugoslav army would be visible from the air.
As the plane took off and made its climb, I gazed down, sensing a combination of thrill and fear as we made our ascent. It was my first time back on a flight since childhood, and this experience felt much different. As I looked out below to the greenery and the mountains, I attempted to identify Slovenia, somewhat foolishly wondering if any signs of the conflict between the Slovenian forces and the Yugoslav army would be visible from the air. Days prior, Slovenia had declared its full independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the federation’s dissolution was now underway.
On the sweltering summer evening of July 1, 1991, we arrived at JFK airport. Upon stepping outside, I was struck by the humid air and the row of yellow taxis outside the airport. That summer was spent primarily in our modest Manhattan apartment, where my father roomed with his cousin. At the time, my father was unemployed, having been let go for political reasons from his position as a commercial director at Eximkos, Kosovo’s export-import company, the year before. I was in the U.S. to pursue my education, while my father was figuring out how to support our family. My mother and siblings joined us soon after in the U.S..
Even before I left Prishtina, I understood that my family’s migration to the U.S. was not an isolated event. While smaller numbers of Kosovar migrants had left since 1945 and through the early 1980s due to political persecution, economic difficulties, or job opportunities across western Europe and elsewhere around the world, the 1990s saw a significant increase in migration.
Meeting fellow migrants from Kosovo and hearing about others who had moved to the U.K., Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Australia and many other places made it clear that we were part of an entire generation sharing similar migration experiences. We didn’t migrate seeking adventure or to pursue grand ambitions; instead, for most of us during that period, living abroad was seen as a temporary solution until the situation back home improved. Our personal stories were part of a broader historical shift in migration patterns, a reality that we may not have fully understood or appreciated at the time, given our preoccupation with the daily challenges of surviving as immigrants.
For those who left their homes in the 1990s with the expectation of returning once conditions improved, there was a strong identification with the struggles of the homeland. This situation also often brought a sense of guilt for leaving behind those who were facing significant threats, a guilt that could only be recompensed by supporting the political struggle of those left behind for liberation from political repression and Kosovo’s independence.
The 1990s played a crucial role in shaping the Kosovo-Albanian diaspora, not just demographically, but the mode of displacement also formed a certain kind of diasporic identity that remained deeply connected to the homeland.
The events that precipitated the mass departure of tens, and ultimately hundreds of thousands from Kosovo in the 1990s, are related to a series of political and economic shifts that had been in the making decades earlier.
Yugoslavia on the brink
The 1980s in Yugoslavia were marked by the political backdrop of repression, which particularly targeted Kosovo in response to the mass protests of 1981 as well as worsening economic conditions that hit a poor region like Kosovo most severely. This was in contrast to the relatively peaceful, relatively prosperous 1970s — relative being a key word — when Kosovo enjoyed a high level of political autonomy, massive federally-funded investments transformed the economy and cultural and educational life bloomed as demographic trends shifted resolutely in favor of the ethnic Albanian majority.
The 1980s brought a different mood throughout the federation. In 1980, the death of Tito — who served in various positions of leadership from 1943, including president from 1953 — no doubt marked the end of a political era. Though aged and taking a back stage politically, Tito stood as a symbol and guarantor of Yugoslav unity during the country’s late period. His death created a void in the realm of both political and symbolic authority. But taking a deeper look economically, the 1970s over which Tito presided were not such a great period for the federation either.
After Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union in 1948, it launched an institutional experiment in “worker self-management” socialism, beginning with reforms in the 1950s that devolved economic power to enterprises. Yugoslav party leaders envisioned this system as an alternative to both Soviet central planning and market capitalism, allowing workers to self-manage enterprises and make investment decisions, elect leaderships and develop business plans, while enabling market exchange in the sale of goods and allowing limited forms of private property. By the 1960s, however, this system had come under strain.
1981 protests
The 1981 protests in Kosovo were a series of student-led demonstrations that escalated into widespread unrest. Initially sparked by demands for better living and study conditions at the University of Prishtina, the protests quickly grew into calls for greater political autonomy and recognition of Kosovo as a republic. The demonstrations were met with a heavy-handed response from Yugoslav authorities, including police and military interventions, resulting in arrests, injuries and deaths.
Through the 1960s, the northern republics of Slovenia and Croatia pushed for greater economic openness toward the West and the expansion of internal markets. In theory, the goal was to construct a market socialist system that combined worker control with market competition and exchange. In practice, the evolving political framework hindered the development of a unified Yugoslav economy and introduced elements of implicit republican mercantilism. This structure encouraged each political unit in the federation to prioritize internal investments and production, while also competing with others to secure larger portions of both the national and export markets. Hence, socialism became, at best, reserved internally for the industries of each republic, while markets left for competition with other republican producers as well as in exports.
The fragmented national market this created became fully evident by the 1970s. The massive inflation crisis that marked the period was a precursor to the austerity and hardships of the 1980s. Today, American and European central bankers are concerned when inflation surpasses 2%. By comparison, while extremely elevated throughout the 1970s, consumer inflation in Yugoslavia peaked in 1981 at a staggering 46%.
Consumer price inflation in Yugoslavia (annual increase in %)
The high level of popular dissatisfaction within Yugoslavia, partly expressed — as in Kosovo that year — through a nationalist idiom, should not overshadow the revolt’s economic roots. In Kosovo, the massive protests of 1981 were not initially prompted by any nationalist slogan, but by a complaint by students at the university cafeteria over the poor quality of the food. Before the famous “Kosova republikë!” — “Kosovo republic!” — chant, students began by tossing their food trays and chanting “duam kushte!” loosely translated as “we demand better living conditions!” After all, the demand for a Kosovo republic was also framed as a demand for greater economic equity in Yugoslavia.
The period saw a significant growth of regional and class inequalities, which came to visibly characterize Yugoslav social life in the 1980s. The inflation crisis itself was experienced differently. In Slovenia, growing exports to Western markets meant that the region earned large amounts of hard currency. Enterprises there could respond to price inflation by raising wages, which in turn would generate a wage-price spiral affecting all the other regions. These distinct regional responses only contributed to the growth of regional disparities. By the 1980s, Kosovo’s per capita GDP fell to 27% of the Yugoslav average, down from 47% in the immediate postwar period. In 1980, Kosovo’s GDP per capita of $795 was meager in comparison to Slovenia’s $3,190.
The political paralysis and outright ineptitude of the federal government was on full display during the period. Throughout the 1970s, while inflation soared, the Yugoslav Central Bank stubbornly maintained a fixed nominal interest rate of 6%. As the country shared a single currency, this amounted to a massive regional and class transfer of wealth. Negative real interest rates benefited enterprises that could borrow cheaply and accumulate wealth that could then be redistributed as new investments or higher wages. It would also stimulate inefficient enterprises that could use cheap credit to support wages while disinvesting from technological and skill upgrades, allowing massive structural inefficiencies to develop.
The period saw a major private housing boom fueled by undervalued loans issued by regional banks. This mostly benefited urban-based managerial and professional classes who could access housing loans, while being less favorable to industrial workers and farmers, many of whom resided in the poorer rural regions of the country and a shrinking base of collectivized apartment blocks. These growing disparities fed into anti-elite sentiments, especially across the southern regions of Yugoslavia, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and central Serbia, where the crisis was felt the most.
The economic support was also a compromise, offered in lieu of granting Kosovo separate republican status within Yugoslavia, which Tito believed would destabilize the country and provoke a Serbian backlash.
In an attempt to address such disparities, in 1966, the Yugoslav government established a federal fund to support less-developed regions, with Kosovo receiving a significant portion of the aid. This increased investment in Kosovo was partly a result of political maneuvering, as Tito sought to balance regional forces and prevent Serb nationalist reactions. The economic support was also a compromise, offered in lieu of granting Kosovo separate republican status within Yugoslavia, which Tito believed would destabilize the country and provoke a Serbian backlash.
According to a calculation by the World Bank, between 1971 and 1975, the federal fund accounted for 70% of fixed capital investments in Kosovo, leading to the construction of large infrastructure projects, including roads and electrification, as well as the expansion of Kosovo’s industrial base. The massive investment that flowed into Kosovo via this redistributive mechanism reshaped Kosovo’s economy and is perhaps the reason why, even under conditions of high inflation, the period is often remembered in a positive light. This form of historical memory, however, conceals the Yugoslav economic system’s growing economic disparities and the institutional contradictions, which precipitated the popular explosions of the 1980s.
Yugoslavia’s black sheep
The outlook in Kosovo in the 1980s was already grim, especially after the mass protests of 1981, given the sudden collapse of investments and the worsening economic situation that contributed to massive unemployment, particularly among youth.
With the institution of a state of emergency in 1981, Kosovo was overrun by Yugoslav military and police. A wave of repression followed, resulting in tens of thousands of Albanians becoming arrested and imprisoned on account of “nationalist expressions” and political displays of “separatism and irredentism.” The economic situation also worsened, as federal investments dried up and many large investment projects got suspended or became shelved. By the late 1980s, with degrading infrastructure and stalling industrial growth, the great era of prosperity of the previous decade already seemed like a distant memory.
1981 state of emergency
On April 2, 1981, the Presidency of Yugoslavia declared a state of emergency in Prishtina and then-Kosovska Mitrovica, which lasted one week. The Presidency sent in special forces to stop the demonstrations, and 30,000 troops were rushed to the province.
The mood in Kosovo was bleak. After 1981, Kosovo was treated as Yugoslavia’s black sheep — one populated by a non-Slavic group allegedly bent on destroying the country. Ironically, it turned out that the rest of Yugoslavia was not living as a big happy family, and broad societal dissatisfaction with the direction of the country ran deep.
In many ways, Milošević represented a typical, upwardly mobile small-town social climber of the Yugoslav economic experiment.
Serbia became the first place where this negative sentiment manifested in a popular fashion. Given its nationalist expression, Kosovo became its unavoidable target. There was always a faction of the Serbian communist party that saw the Titoite experiment of decentralized federalism with deep suspicion. But in the end, it would not be any of the traditional Serbian communists that would take charge of Serbia’s transformation in the 1980s, but a fellow from the small town of Požarevac by the name of Slobodan Milošević.
In many ways, Milošević represented a typical, upwardly mobile small-town social climber of the Yugoslav economic experiment. He received a law degree in Belgrade and his ambitions drove him into the Serbian communist party and then a rapidly ascending career in banking. In 1978, Milošević became the head of Belgrade’s largest bank, Beobanka, lending him connections to the international banking community. This high profile, seemingly cosmopolitan façade, made Milošević appear as an ambitious and promising young leader to the Serbian party leader Ivan Stambolić.
A pivotal moment of Milošević capturing greater political power in Serbia came in 1986. That year, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts leaked a notorious and highly controversial Memorandum, which listed a set of national grievances about the alleged historical and ongoing victimization of Serbs in the Yugoslav federation. Stambolić rejected the Memorandum’s nationalist rhetoric, while advocating for amending the Yugoslav constitution in a way that would allow Serbia to reassert control over its provinces, including Kosovo. Milošević, by contrast, did not think the Serbian Academy’s ethnonationalism was to be kept at bay, and instead turned it into a rhetorical weapon in the political effort to remake Yugoslav federalism. By 1987, Milošević had taken over the Serbian party, turning against and ultimately ousting his political patron Stambolić.
Milošević’s rise marked a fundamental change in the Serbian party’s political orientation with regard to Yugoslavia’s future. In true populist style, Milošević quickly displaced the large array of Yugoslavia’s economic problems by reframing them as issues of nationalist pride. He drew heavily from the Serbian Academy’s discourse to portray Serbs as Yugoslavia’s victims. In the new framing, the political efforts to devolve power in Yugoslavia since the 1960s were part of a larger project — or conspiracy, if you prefer — to weaken Serbia and strengthen the other republics.
Kosovo’s autonomy was offered as exhibit A of this alleged effort, as it divided power not only within Yugoslavia, but also devolved Serbia into a federal state composed of three subunits — Vojvodina, Kosovo and central Serbia — each of which held a veto over Serbia’s policy. The chief task of the Serbian leadership under Milošević became rectifying this perceived historical wrong. As a first step, the Serbian leadership demanded the recentralization of the Serbian republic into a unitary state, followed by reasserting Serbia’s dominance within the federal union.
Of course, the first effort meant undoing by force the political compromise on Kosovo’s self-rule within Yugoslavia, which had been struck by a previous generation of leaders. The new Serbian leadership became notoriously ruthless in carrying out this project. Pursuing a wide range of smear campaigns, coups, repression, and outright violence against opponents, the first target was the 1974 Serbian constitution.
The dynamics this unleashed in Kosovo were pernicious and destructive. The party leadership in Kosovo had already been weakened and divided in the 1980s. The passing and/or retirement of the original group of post-World War II leaders occurred without a proper handover of power to a new generation, many of which suffered under the repression after 1981.
Most prominent is the case of Mahmut Bakalli, a rising leader in the 1970s, who was reprimanded by the federation for his handling of the mass protests of 1981 and forced to resign. Bakalli initially tried to downplay the protests and reign over them via local authorities. When this effort failed and the protests only grew in size and intensity, the federal government immediately took note and intervened directly, undermining Kosovo’s provincial leadership. This meant that, by the late 1980s, the provincial party was in no position to stand up against the onslaught of Serbian pressure to undo Kosovo’s autonomy.
In 1989, the Serbian leadership rammed through a constitutional reform that effectively revoked Kosovo’s self-rule. Leading up to this revocation and the months after, a number of independent popular movements emerged, sparking mass resistance to Serbia’s forceful takeover of the province. A massive strike by Trepça miners in February 1989 in defense of Kosovo’s autonomy opened the door to a wave of other protests and civic initiatives. With the party leadership sidelined or imprisoned, Kosovo Albanian non-party cultural and intellectual elites emerged as spokespersons for the discontent in Kosovo against Serbian rule and growing hopes for a democratic breakthrough. In February 1989, 215 Albanian intellectuals signed what’s known as the Apeli i 215 — Appeal 215 — demanding an end to Belgrade’s political assault on Kosovo’s self-government and repression.
The dissent culminated into a full-fledged revolt in 1990. That year, in a clandestine meeting, the remaining members of the Kosovo Assembly — who had been shut out of the 1989 meeting that voted to overturn Kosovo’s autonomy — gathered in the town of Kaçanik to proclaim the adoption of a “Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo.” This constitution was premised on the resolution, passed by the same assembly faction in 1989, that effectively proclaimed the sovereignty of Kosovo in the context of the then still-existing Yugoslav federation.
This year 1990 was also significant because it saw the formation of Kosovo’s first non-communist political party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). While it began as a motley crew of journalists, writers, historians and other academics who increasingly openly stepped up to oppose the Serbian occupation of Kosovo, in December 1990, a founding group of writers and intellectuals proclaimed the establishment of the LDK and elected literary critic Ibrahim Rugova as its chair.
Existing non-party political structures, such as the “popular front” organizations of the Socialist League of Working People almost immediately proclaimed their allegiance to the LDK. This turned, virtually overnight, the mostly intellectual group organized around the Writers Association of Kosovo, which Rugova headed, into a mass political movement. With the provincial communist party turned into an empty shell fully staffed by cronies installed by Belgrade, the LDK’s mass support quickly turned it and Rugova as the primary representatives and voices of Kosovo’s Albanian population.
The 1990s paradox
At the turn of the new decade, the political situation in Kosovo became in certain ways paradoxical.
On the one hand, political repression by Serbia increasingly turned to direct violent repression and an apartheid system of rule began to take shape. Kosovo’s police and security forces were disbanded and taken over by forces deployed from Serbia, courts were packed with Serbian regime loyalists and Albanians began to be massively dismissed from jobs in enterprises taken over by Belgrade-installed management. All of this created a desperate and ghastly situation of persecution.
On the other hand, the crumbling of single-party rule created opportunities for greater political and civic expression. New channels, such as new independent media, emerged for the emerging Kosovo Albanian counter-elites and members of the public to express their opposition to Serbian rule, document human rights abuses, as well as issue demands for democratization and seek international support for Kosovo’s plight.
In other words, unlike the post-1981 repression during which dissidence was hidden from the regime to avoid direct persecution and imprisonment, the 1990s began with a situation in which mass repression and great optimism for the future coexisted.
The hope of the era came also to be sustained by a series of coordinated political actions and mass mobilization that culminated in what came to be known as Kosovo’s parallel state. The naked power grab and outright ruthlessness of the methods of Milošević’s takeover of Kosovo left the Serbian regime with few political allies on the Albanian side, the remainder of which were quickly discredited and held little to no authority among the Albanian majority.
Instead, Milošević’s frontal attack on Kosovo’s institutions generated a relatively homogenized, nationally-based popular mobilization against what Albanian elites described as an outright military occupation. The coordinated moves by the remaining members of the Kosovo Assembly, as well as the LDK, became critical in channeling this mobilization into organized forms of popular resistance.
The KLA, too, oscillated between depicting itself as an independent national liberation group and an armed component of the parallel state of Kosovo.
The parallel state became a symbolic expression of resistance, and the shadow “Republic of Kosovo” was a political fiction with mobilizational value, more than an active political effort to overcome Serbian rule. Clandestine elections in 1992 elected a new multiparty parliament (though dominated by the LDK), and Rugova as president of the shadow Republic of Kosovo. This set of institutions consolidated the parallel state, a vast, Kosovo-wide network of semi-clandestine educational, medical, charitable and political organizations coordinated primarily by the LDK.
The 1990 Kaçanik constitution foresaw a republican and parliamentary structure and a popularly elected president. Yet other than Rugova’s performative acts as president, no other institution became functional, or did so at a distance. The new parliament of Kosovo, elected in 1992, did not continue to meet.
The parliament held a single clandestine meeting in 1992, in which it elected medical doctor Bujar Bukoshi as prime minister, alongside a cabinet of ministers, who were promptly forced into exile in Germany. Moreover, there were multiple controversies, especially over the creation of interior and defense ministries of the shadow Republic of Kosovo. The issue of organized armed troops of the clandestine Republic of Kosovo became a charged issue as well in the ensuing conflict between Bukoshi and Rugova in the late 1990s, as well as between Bukoshi and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), who saw themselves as the only legitimate fighting force in Kosovo, in opposition to the armed forces of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo (FARK).
Willing to tolerate political dissent and Rugova’s public proclamations for an independent Kosovo, Serbia would not tolerate the organization of potentially armed Albanian forces that could directly confront its rule in Kosovo. The matter became particularly sensitive in the period between 1993-95, when wars ravaged Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the tie-up of Serbian resources in those efforts seemed to create a chance for a “third front” in Kosovo.
By the mid-1990s, the parallel state became the framework of growing internal political conflict among Kosovo Albanians, especially as Rugova’s insistence on peaceful resistance and his path of waiting for external intervention to end the Serbian occupational regime and resolve the problem of Kosovo’s status seemed to not bear fruit. After the 1995 Dayton Accords, which crafted a peace deal for Bosnia and Herzegovina and ignored the issue of Kosovo, oppositional voices against Rugova’s approach only grew in number and intensity.
The KLA’s birth has its beginnings in that dissent. The KLA, too, oscillated between depicting itself as an independent national liberation group and an armed component of the parallel state of Kosovo.
Regardless of such internal political tensions, the parallel state embodied a set of deep solidarities and networks of support that enabled a semblance of normalcy for a population that had increasingly become subject to what was correctly labeled an apartheid-type system that Serbia constructed in Kosovo during that period.
The preservation of an Albanian-language education system is a storied accomplishment of the parallel state, as Albanian teachers and students were shut out of school buildings and the campus of the University of Prishtina. Most of this was accomplished by schools being settled and operating in private homes. Culture went “underground” as cafes and restaurants served as galleries and exhibits and replaced intellectual salons as sites of political discussion. This was an effort that demanded great danger and sacrifice.
The creation of a system of financial support, including financial support for teachers, was critical in the existence of the parallel state and sustaining the resistance against Serbian rule. This system was run by the LDK and relied on a voluntary 3% tax paid by Albanians in Kosovo and the diaspora. This fund remained under the control of Bukoshi, who was in Germany, and was used to support education and later the war efforts in the late 1990s. The Mother Teresa organization ran a large network of charities and clinics that also provided basic support to a population under threat.
The diaspora came to play a pivotal financial role through its hard currency remittances, enabling Kosovo to survive the otherwise bleak economic conditions in the 1990s. Solidarity within Kosovo and through the diaspora manifested through a series of gatherings, campaigns of support and the local activism of diaspora members to gain international support for Kosovo’s plight.
A personal conclusion
As a member of the diaspora in the 1990s, I also helped support campaigns advocating for Kosovo’s independence. These gained momentum over time. Many of those who left Kosovo in the 1990s took part in protests at the U.N. headquarters in New York, and the White House and the Capitol in Washington, D.C.. A number of prominent diaspora members created lobbying groups like the Albanian-American Civic League under the leadership of former congressman Joe DioGuardi and the National Albanian-American Council. Both these organizations played pivotal roles in lobbying for U.S. support for Kosovo throughout the 1990s.
Around the mid-1990s, as a young student, I was introduced to the emerging technology of the internet. As the internet suddenly took off, it became one of the key platforms through which a group of us, connected through diasporic networks in New York, mobilized to advocate for U.S. support of Kosovo’s independence. Providing a new channel for disseminating information, we would make available over the Internet, to a much wider international public, monthly and weekly reports from the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms (CDHRF), one of the independent organizations established during the pluralistic openings of 1989. With its vast network of activists, CDHRF meticulously recorded incidents of Serbian state violence across Kosovo and became a key actor in documenting and making internationally known the state-led terror of the period.
My path led me from activism to academia at a very critical time for Kosovo, shaping my early intellectual interests. In 1999, I was a graduate student in the program for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.. Given my humble immigrant background and previous attendance of a public college in New York, being accepted into Georgetown seemed like a significant achievement. In my second year in the program, I decided to write my master’s thesis on Kosovo’s parallel state.
Writing my thesis felt like a solitary endeavor, documenting an era that might soon become irrelevant for a place that could potentially disappear.
I vividly remember sitting in the European Reading Room at the Library of Congress, searching for archival sources on Yugoslavia and Kosovo during the 1980s and 1990s. This was a time when NATO bombing of the rump Yugoslavia (Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro) had commenced, and hundreds of thousands of Albanians, including my family members, were forcibly displaced by Serbian military and paramilitary forces. The feeling of deep anxiety and grief as I read about the history of a place I feared might cease to exist is still etched in my memory. This experience has instilled in me a profound empathy for émigrés, refugees and migrants whose home countries are embroiled in conflict.
During the height of the bombing in the spring of 1999, the situation in Kosovo seemed dire. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, and many were being massacred. With the U.S. refusing to commit ground troops, it was uncertain whether the bombing would end favorably for the Kosovo Albanians. Writing my thesis felt like a solitary endeavor, documenting an era that might soon become irrelevant for a place that could potentially disappear.
Fortunately, my fears were only partially realized. The arrival of NATO troops in Kosovo in June 1999 allowed many to return home. Kosovo began its reconstruction and entered the new century in relative peace, albeit under a radically different political configuration dominated by NATO and the U.N.. The decade marked by despair, hope, fear and courage had come to an end, ushering in a new era, and a new millennium, of great energy and enthusiasm for the future. The parallel state, which was the focus of my thesis, quickly dissolved, overtaken by other institutions, as I discovered during my return trip in July 1999, exactly eight years after my initial departure. As someone who had long left the growing pains of teenage years behind and was extensively Americanized, I felt increasingly like an alien in the place that was supposed to represent “home.”
In retrospect, my feeling that I was documenting a past, both personal and collective, that was unrepeatable and soon to be forgotten, turned out to not be entirely inaccurate.
Feature Image: Creative Commons.
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