The silences and noises of a decade
Intricate everyday life between memory and history of the '90s.
By Eli Krasniqi | March 18, 2025
I’ve heard, from time to time, the generations who grew up or were adolescents in the ‘90s — usually in the context of education — being called the “lost generations.” This has always made me think. We lose when we forget. But who decides what we remember and what we forget?
When the ’90s are remembered or written about, they are often swallowed into grand narratives of the nation, the internationalization of the national cause, social movements and war, leaving everyday life to be lost in the background. This is where the importance of micro-history and the history of everyday life — Alltagsgeschichte — comes to the surface: the effort to understand how political, social and economic developments shape people’s lives. In Kosovo in the 1990s, because of the marginalization and systemic injustices that came with those developments, Albanian society created a value system rooted in collectivity, solidarity and resistance.
It goes without saying that the intersecting realities resulting from multiple national, gender and class oppressions in Kosovo cannot be fully examined in a single article. However, this piece — organized in the form of narratives from entirely personal experiences, details of events, occasionally supported by archival and theoretical references — seeks to create a general impression of everyday life in the ’90s.
This decade included a peaceful resistance, which initially aimed to preserve lives by taking into account the persecution, killings and imprisonments of Albanians by the state; the parallel system, which aimed at the refunctionalization of Albanian society, which was pushed into extreme margins after the revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy in March 1989; the internationalization of the Kosovo issue, as the oppression of Albanians would not be resolved by Yugoslavia if it did not receive international attention or pressure, and finally, the armed resistance during 1998-1999.
Every segment of this period was part of the path towards the missing freedom, as the imagination and the aspirations for that freedom, became the axis around which Albanians survived.
An onion a day keeps the tear gas away
Mom placed the plates of beans on the table. Mimoza, my close friend, after saying “thank you,” had removed some tiny pieces of onion that hadn’t been minced or mashed properly. Mom asked her with a smile: “Mimoza, you don’t like them?”
“No, no, Auntie Remzie, don’t worry, there aren’t many, just these tiny pieces,” Mimoza replied with a smile.
Mimoza and I kept removing the tiny pieces of onion from the plate, being the proper “separatists” we were. And so, the conversation turned to onions and garlic. Mom telling us about how healthy they are, and us saying how useful they could be — especially onions against tear gas — and laughing.
We knew it ourselves, but also from our older siblings, that ever since 1989, when Serbia revoked Kosovo’s autonomy, you’d go out with onions in your pockets because of the frequent protests. We started enacting funny situations — mothers standing by the door, seeing their kids off: “Wait, you forgot your onion!” or “Better to have an onion in your pocket than under your head,” a play on “better have onions under your head,” an Albanian proverb implying “better be safe!”
Laughter and jokes aside, we knew that tear gas was next to nothing compared to being killed. We had been children when, during a protest in the village of Lupç i Poshtëm in Podujevë on February 1, 1990, the police killed 16-year-old Ylfete Humolli. The policeman had stepped out of his vehicle and fired at the demonstrators. That same evening, after the killing, in the yard of the Humolli family homes — not far from where Ylfete had been murdered — while her body lay in the morgue, the police fired tear gas. I didn’t know this at the time, or maybe I did and forgot. I relearned it later, while going through archives for my research on the 1990s.
As a sign of protest, Albanians across Kosovo turned off their lights for five minutes and lit candles in their windows, along with a series of other activities throughout the day. RTP, Prishtina’s radio and television station, had not reported the news.
Between 1990 and 1991, the police killed 75 protesters. Throughout the ‘90s, we learned that you didn’t even have to be at a protest to end up murdered.
On the night of April 21, 1996, Armend Daci, a student, was on his way home when a Serb civilian named Zlatko Jovanović shot and killed him in the Aktash neighborhood of Prishtina. Jovanović had casually stepped onto his balcony, or stood by his window, and fired at Armend — some said with a sniper rifle — just as Armend had turned 20.
Two days later, on April 23, the Women’s Forum of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) — LDK being the largest party throughout the ‘90s — together with the Center for the Protection of Women and Children and the Albanian Women’s League, called on women to hold a silent protest with candles and flowers placed at the spot where Armend was killed, just 500 meters from his home.
Shortly after, the Independent Union of University of Prishtina Students (UPSUP) — from the parallel Albanian-run university — also called for a protest on April 26 at 9 p.m., urging people across Kosovo to turn off their lights for five minutes and light candles, just as they had done in 1990.
The autonomy that was revoked in 1989 had been achieved through the 1974 constitution, which the Albanian political elite, together with miners, students, workers and citizens in general, sought to defend through protests, marches and strikes. The trajectory of Kosovo’s status since World War II reflects the political tensions between Yugoslavia’s proclaimed principles of equality — only valid on paper — and Serbia’s real ambitions in practice.
Without wages, social protection, healthcare or education, Albanians faced extreme poverty — but they also organized collectively.
Following the revocation of autonomy, Serbia installed what were called “violent measures,” which meant bringing all of Kosovo’s institutions under Serbian control and the policy of differentiation. The latter meant the marginalization of Albanians in the workplace, often culminating in outright dismissals, with far-reaching consequences. This was, in effect, a form of “civil death,” as Antoine Garapon, a jurist and member of the International Federation for Human Rights Commission, described it after his visit to Kosovo in November 1989.
The mass dismissals from work were, in reality, expulsions from all public institutions, often carried out with brutal police violence against Albanian workers, who were then replaced by Serbs. As a result, it was estimated that 700,000 families were left without access to health insurance, pensions and child benefits. The loss of wages, social protection, healthcare and education deeply impoverished Albanians. In response, Albanians organized collectively.
The so-called parallel system was established. Kosovo’s government-in-exile was formed, and the entire system was supported by a financial structure funded through a 3% tax on Albanian incomes worldwide, with the diaspora playing a crucial role. Education and healthcare operated in private buildings. Since Albanians were also expelled from RTP in July 1990, Albanian Radio and Television in Albania allocated two hours of satellite broadcasting to fired RTP staff. Meanwhile, Rilindja, the Albanian-language daily that was shut down, continued to publish through Bujku, a newspaper that had previously focused on agricultural issues.
When the regime closed schools and universities to Kosovo Albanians, citizens opened their homes and vacant spaces to hold classes. Prenk Jakova Music High School, which I attended, held lessons in the house of the national activist Ibrahim Gashi. Being part of the underground movement, Ilegale, himself, the same house had hosted the first meetings for organizing the 1968 demonstration — something we didn’t know at the time. I only learned about it later while researching the women of Ilegale.
The Ilegale movement consisted of various groups and organizations operating covertly since the end of World War II, across different periods. Despite programmatic changes over time, their fundamental and shared goal was resisting Yugoslav — especially Serbian — discrimination and oppression of Albanians.
We didn’t rebel against the poor conditions because attending school and being a good student had become almost like a patriotic duty.
In the Gashi family home, our classrooms during the day were the rooms of the family’s children, Arbëria, Mirëdita, Milot and Mrika, at night. They, too, attended classes in the homes of other families. Within the courtyard of this house was another home, where the Vehapi family lived — a couple with two small children, Segja and Burak. We also held lessons in their house, in two rooms — one of which, the living room, had an aquarium with goldfish. The two rooms had been turned into classrooms, where upright pianos and pentagram boards stood.
Instead of chairs, we had either wooden planks placed on two logs or some makeshift seating, like benches with cushions. We had no desks. There was no heating in the winter. We kept warm with a small quartz heater with three bars — one of which conveniently replaced a match when we illegally smoked in school. We didn’t rebel against the poor conditions because attending school and being a good student had become almost like a patriotic duty.
After wiping our plates clean of beans, thoroughly discussing the benefits of onions, Mimoza and I headed out for one of the “walks” that UPSUP organized back in 1997, along the city’s promenades. Prishtina’s promenades had always been more lines of division than of unity between Albanian and Serb youth. During the socialist years, Albanians would walk on one side in one direction, while on the other side, moving in the opposite direction, were Serbs and Montenegrins. Albanians started walking there less frequently after 1988, even more so after 1989. Following the mass demonstrations of the early ’90s, they became just passersby.
The “walks” on the promenades in 1997 were political acts — assertions of our presence in public space and a prelude to the October 1 demonstration, the first mass protest after a pause for several years in the peaceful resistance led by the LDK. The party saw patience and restraint as a strategy for preserving lives, among other things.
For me, Mimoza, Tina, Benet and other friends from my generation, October 1, 1997 was also our first day at university.
But silence at a demonstration is something different. Especially in the moments before the tear gas — or even the bullets — are fired. It’s not an ordinary silence. Something shifts in the air, bringing down that silence.
It was a peaceful demonstration. That’s why we had been told that all students should wear white shirts. Over 30,000 students filled the streets of Velania, a neighborhood in Prishtina, with every alleyway packed. Armed police, clad in bulletproof vests and wielding batons, were stationed in the middle of the neighborhood as well as throughout the city. Standing in rigid formation, lined up horizontally, legs spread apart, they struck their hands with their batons.
We were silent. But silence at a demonstration is something different. Especially in the moments before the tear gas — or even the bullets — are fired. It’s not an ordinary silence. Something shifts in the air, bringing down that silence. It lands on your shoulders, but it doesn’t weigh on you. It covertly pierces your body like a needle, weaving threads that bind everyone together. Threads that transform into action, into unity and solidarity. The thread does not break. Should someone fall, others grab them by the arms, dragging them to a place where they can recover. That must be how they pulled Ylfete, hoping she would come around. That must be how they pulled the others killed in the demonstrations of ’89 and the early ’90s, clinging to the hope that they would come around again.
On October 1, 1997, after a several-year pause in peaceful resistance, over 30,000 students filled the streets of the Velania neighborhood in Prishtina. Photo on the left: Courtesy of the author. Photo on the right: Mihane Salihu-Bala.
The order was given, and it felt as if it had come straight from the helicopter circling not far above our heads. The police charged at us. The organizers told us to sit on the ground as a sign that we weren’t confronting them. We, dressed in white shirts, sat down, expressing our demands for the right to education in school and university facilities. Meanwhile, they, the police, struck us with batons and threw tear gas.
We had no onions in our pockets, damn it. I don’t understand how we didn’t bring onions with us that day. Amid the burning in our eyes and throats, the coughing, the tears, the dizziness, the running, the stampede — we reached a house where a woman opened the door for us. We told her: “onions, give us onions!” She, her voice trembling along with her body, told us that the onions were in the basement.
We grabbed a wooden crate full of onions and distributed them. As “separatists,” Mimoza and I peeled the layers, pressing them to our eyes and noses. At some point, we just started eating them. Like apples. We — who usually found tiny bits of onion in our beans annoying.
White paper sheets
The year 1989, when autonomy was revoked, marked all of our lives. But the marks on the surface, the ones I was aware of at the time, were mostly small, just like my age at the time: 10. In March, autonomy was taken away; in July, I got my first period; in September, we had already parted ways with our primary school teacher and were starting fifth grade with subject teachers and in October, I turned 11.
I didn’t fully understand what the revocation of autonomy meant, but it was the only thing people talked about both at home and outside. Yet, that same year and the one after, with news of mass protests and killings, job dismissals and then ethnic division of schools through walls and the poisonings, the loss of autonomy started making sense even to us kids, along with a deep awareness that we had no rights at all because we were Albanian. Because of this, danger felt as close as death itself — closer than the shirt on our backs, as the saying goes.
The separation in schools was done with walls and in such a way that, essentially, 80% of Albanian students were crammed into just 20% of the school’s space. The other 80% of the space was left to Serb students, who were perhaps even fewer than 20%. This also depended on the area.
We had staged a protest in front of the school, completely spontaneously, but my memory of the details of this episode is quite blurry. Our protest must have been simple, with two fingers raised as a symbol of peace and democracy. Raising our fingers had almost become a greeting for us, and for them, the police and most Serb civilians, a “provokacija,” or provocation. It was reason enough for brutal beatings and arrests. During this period, any action by Albanians was considered a “provokacija.”
When the mass poisonings occurred in schools after the ethnic separation, it was clear that only Albanian students were affected — over 3,000 of them, according to an international commission led by Bernard Benedetti, a doctor from Médecins du Monde. The Serb side claimed it was a case of collective hysteria, and for the poisoned young boys and girls, they would say that even the actors at the Cannes Film Festival would envy their performances.
Other forms of protest, which almost all of us remember, included banging pots and pans with spoons or whatever we had on hand, anything that made noise, from our balconies. This form of protest, known as cacerolazo, has been used in many places in Latin America, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. It was called for in June 1991 by the Parliamentary Party of Kosovo, one of the parties formed after March 1989.
At 12 p.m., we would go out onto our balconies and make noise for five minutes with pots and pans — a symbolic act of hunger, a consequence of the mass firings of Albanians from their jobs. By 1991, 146,025 Albanians had been fired. Then there was the protest where we shook our keys, and much later, sometime in 1997 or 1998 — I don’t remember exactly — the one with alarm clocks all ringing at the same time. I believe that on that same day, Serb students also held demonstrations, opposing Albanian students’ demands for the right to education in university and school buildings. Their banners read: “Ne dajte im olovke” — Don’t give them pencils.
The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had already emerged into the open. Watching the images on television, we realized that these soldiers were mostly young men and women our age, worn down by political and economic oppression and violence.
The women’s protests were just as important — if not more so — because they did not always fully adhere to the several year pause in peaceful resistance advocated by the LDK. The silent protest condemning the murder of Armend Daci was the first public gathering after six years of passive resistance. Women’s resistance was multifaceted, as was the oppression they faced: national and gendered, while the symbolism of their protests took many forms. Among the many protests organized by women, particularly in March 1998, the one most remembered is the march known as “Bread for Drenica.”
By the end of February and the beginning of March 1998, war had begun in Drenica in central Kosovo. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had already emerged into the open. Watching the images on television, we realized that these soldiers were mostly young men and women our age, worn down by political and economic oppression and violence. Their patience had run out. Serbia called them terrorists. To us, they were liberators. In three attacks over five days, Serbian forces killed 84 people, at least 24 of whom were women and children.
The civilian population, forced to take shelter in the mountains while facing the cold and a complete lack of food, was totally cut off. The Serbian military did not allow aid to pass through — not even via humanitarian organizations — claiming that they were secretly smuggling weapons.
Women feminist activists organized themselves, joined by other women from across Kosovo. On the morning of March 16, 1998, in silence and solemnity, around 10,000 women, each carrying a loaf of bread, marched from the U.S. Information Center — or the American Office, as we called it — located in the Arbëri (formerly Dragodan) neighborhood of Prishtina, all the way to Fushë Kosovë, where the police stopped them and prevented them from continuing further.
The march aimed to ease the humanitarian crisis in Drenica by delivering bread and alert the international community to what was happening. This march gained significant international attention, just like the protest on March 8 before it, known as the “White Sheets Protest.”
The activists had said that this March 8 was not a celebration for us, and beyond our doorsteps, there was nowhere else to go.
Women feminist activists had decided that the protest would be peaceful, holding white sheets of paper as a symbol of the total absence of human and national rights for Albanians. The main slogan of the protest, “We stand strong in front of our doors,” was also connected to the fact that the women, who could not participate in the protest in front of the U.S. Embassy, could protest by standing at the thresholds of their homes with white sheets of paper in their hands. The activists had said that this March 8 was not a celebration for us, and beyond our doorsteps, there was nowhere else to go.
Thousands of women, amid strong police presence, stood together in silence holding white sheets of paper in their hands. Police radio communications were all that could be heard. To me, it seemed like we could even hear our own breaths.
The women handed a declaration, the Declaration of the Silent Protest, to the head of the U.S. Information Center. Signed by the Center for the Protection of Women and Children, the Women’s Forum of the LDK, the Albanian Women’s League and the Media Project, among others, the declaration stated: “We opt for peace, and for this reason with the white sheets of paper, we show the world that we have no rights and that we want to write our rights in peace, not in war.”
Sometimes wearing white shirts, other times holding white sheets of paper, in every possible way, we tried to send messages of peace and show the world that we are peaceful. Now, it’s not entirely easy to give meaning to those symbolisms, because the context is different. What remains, however, is the memory, which sometimes peels like an onion, and at other times creates dark holes in which events and episodes are hidden.
When I look at the archives from that period, the photographs that always spark my memory, I see women in protests wearing coats and headscarves. This represents an interesting element, given that socialist modernity cemented, especially in the 1970s, these women as only part of the private sphere.
The prevailing impression was that women could participate in the public sphere as citizens only if they didn’t wear headscarves. The idea of removing the headscarf in relation to emancipation was entrenched after World War II with the Women’s Antifascist Front. This was not only in Yugoslavia but also in other communist countries with Muslim minorities. In Kosovo, since the late ‘80s, women with and without headscarves have made their presence public, sometimes as mothers, sometimes as citizens. This was yet another fusion of the divide between the private and public spheres, and another break that women were showing amidst other divides.
It is not a given that memory of this period, including efforts for gender liberation, easily surfaces. In “The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future,” Carol Gilligan and David A. J. Richards suggest something along the lines of trauma often resulting in the loss of memory and voice. They focus on the dynamics of intimate relationships and patriarchy, but this loss to me resonates with what the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argues in “On Collective Memory” — that we remember as part of a group. Furthermore, it is the relations of economic and political power that impose amnesia or shape memory regarding specific historical segments.
Within these power dynamics, not just in Kosovo, of course, women are routinely pushed toward the vortex of oblivion.
This isn’t all that difficult, given that people generally measure developments and progress by their own lifespan — and this is where the importance of memory emerges, in that it must be carried across generations. Not to create a singular narrative of the past, but rather to expand the space for nuanced narratives, of marginalized people and groups, so that, ideally, memory can resist being swallowed up by regimes and those in power.
This is especially the case considering that collective memory is a construct, as Halbwachs argues, shaped by the needs of the present. In other words, memory and forgetting — and even more so, history and historians — remain innocent only as long as they are not swallowed by power for the purpose of projecting political and economic futures. Within these power dynamics, not just in Kosovo, of course, women are routinely pushed toward the vortex of oblivion.
Beyond feminists, it is rarely, if ever, stated explicitly or voiced loudly that Albanian women in Kosovo, despite the prevailing stereotype of them as secluded behind high courtyard walls, confined in homes and submissive — stereotypes nurtured and propagated for years in Yugoslavia and beyond — were, in reality, the initiators or propellers of major social, political and economic transformations.
All these initiatives and movements paved the way toward both national and gender liberation. The latter remains in process.
The spark that ignited the student demonstration in March 1981 was the revolt of student Bahrije Kastrati, who slammed her food tray in the Prishtina student cafeteria. The students’ frustration stemmed from the harsh conditions in the dormitories and cafeteria, which were a reflection of broader economic and political struggles. Kosovo had always been the poorest region of Yugoslavia. What began as a student uprising quickly escalated into mass demonstrations. The central demand to solve the political and social inequalities Albanians faced was for Kosovo to become a republic. The 1981 demonstrations are widely regarded as the first signs of the beginning of Yugoslavia’s dissolution.
In 1989, a group of intellectual women who initially gathered at the National Library in Prishtina, represented by the prominent feminist Sevdije Ahmeti, founded the first women’s association, called the Independent Women’s Association. This association was short-lived and merely an attempt to break away from politics, as it was soon swallowed by the LDK. However, throughout the 1990s, women went on to establish other independent organizations that played crucial roles in education, healthcare and culture.
Education, in particular, was a field where women contributed, whether through formal organizations, informal initiatives or as teachers who took students into their homes to ensure they didn’t miss out on their education when schools were shut down. For instance, the Motrat Qiriazi organization, founded and led by Safete and Igballe Rogova, launched literacy courses in 1990 under the motto “With a pencil to Europe — stop illiteracy,” establishing 33 branches across Kosovo. Later, in 1993, the Group of Creators and Veterans of Education, founded by Naxhije Buçinca, helped enroll 94 girls in primary and secondary schools. Other smaller groups and organizations also emerged.
It was the members of the Ilegale organizations — Have Shala and Myrvete Dreshaj at first, followed by Akile Dedinca and Zoge Shala — who took the initiative to mediate blood feuds, an effort that soon turned into a massive popular movement. All these initiatives and movements paved the way toward both national and gender liberation. The latter remains in process.
Women’s production and reproduction — both in the public and private spheres — were at the core of survival, resistance and resilience in Kosovo. Gender freedom in this period was often suppressed in the name of the national cause, with the “promise” that gender equality would come with liberation. As is often the case, also in other contexts, after the 1998-99 war, this “promise” did not materialize on its own, and feminists had to continue their struggle for gender equality on multiple fronts and within various hierarchies.
The international community never failed to remind us of the war and NATO’s intervention for humanitarian purposes — a reminder that often felt like a form of discipline. Implicitly, and at times even explicitly, we were told to forget and to start from scratch, writing Kosovo as if on a blank sheet. This kind of “forgetting,” in a way, seemed to also imply the erasure of women’s activism.
After Kosovo declared independence in 2008, the feminist movement seemed to free itself from the burden of the national question. Shaped by the legacy of social movements during socialism — especially the women’s movement of the 1990s — and by the broader struggle for freedom, today, the feminist movement in Kosovo is one of the most dynamic in the Balkans.
Across generations, feminists remember.
The jar
Despite my mother’s efforts to offer me a variety of dishes, I didn’t like eating, so much so that by 1994, I had developed anemia. There were only a few things I enjoyed, like smoki — the peanut puff snack, with yogurt — a combination I learned from my classmate Benet — and gurabija me arra — cookies with walnuts. The ones that Benet’s mother, Aunt Nazë, made, and I ate with delight on their 14th-floor balcony in the Lakrishtë neighborhood of Prishtina. From that height, where the purple dusks looked even more vivid, the world was soft.
Long story short, I had to undergo therapy. At the same time, my parents put me on a strict, dictatorial eating regime. Between pleas and threats to get me to eat, one of the worst punishments was a bowl of carrots and red beetroot. The beetroot smelled of soil. I despised it.
The threats of embargoes and economic sanctions continued until the blood test results were improved, almost up until the time of the war. When the Serbian forces began expelling Albanians from their homes, right after the NATO bombing started on March 24, 1999, our family, together with hundreds of thousands, found itself in one of the two corridors that were opened, towards Albania and Macedonia.
We, along with two other families in cars, were in the long column of the displaced, about six kilometers away from the town of Han i Elezit, heading towards the border. In haste and anxiety, we had taken some food, but after maybe three days, we went hungry and saved food in small bites for our grandmother. She was completely silent, weak. She knew what war was. She had survived World War II, and before that, as a baby, she and her brother had been the only survivors from their immediate family in the January 1921 massacre in the villages of Gollaku, carried out by the gendarmerie of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
Throughout the long column of deportees, paramilitaries wandered. In various parts of Kosovo, many of the killings and rapes occurred when these paramilitaries pulled men, boys, girls and women from the column. And in this atmosphere of fear, the Serbian army brought bread. Elsewhere in Kosovo, they would shell and kill, but here they gave us bread. After some doubt about whether we should take bread from them, we decided to go, but in the crowd’s push, my two sisters ended up falling and terrified. Only one jar of I-don’t-know-what remained, which a soldier handed to me. I held the jar in my hand, not as a survival trophy, but simply as a tragic artifact. Even later, as I remembered this episode, I saw myself, skinny and pale, holding a jar in my hand.
Researching in the archives is like touching time itself, or perhaps some of its dimensions.
Much later, when I read my diary about this period, amid the fear and the terrible cold, another central topic emerging was hunger. We could see others boiling nettles. Meanwhile, I noticed a soldier talking to my brother, Meti. I don’t know if it was the same one who had given me the jar.
Terrified of what was happening, when he returned to the cars, Meti told us that the soldier had told him he was a reservist from Niš, a recently graduated doctor who had been drafted by the Serbian army. A few minutes later, we saw the soldier crying. I was completely confused. At that time, I couldn’t logically connect his presence there with his crying. Why hadn’t he fled? That could have been like Meti in the early ’90s, some time in the war in Croatia or Bosnia, when the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) was forcibly drafting young men in Kosovo for military service.
In 1991, when Meti received the invitation from the JNA for the second time, like many youngsters, he fled the country. Of the young men drafted into the army, many returned in metal coffins, hermetically sealed, with an order not to open the coffin, and the explanation that the soldier had committed suicide. However, the families of the slain, whenever they could escape the strict surveillance of the police, would open these coffins. The young Albanian men must have had incredible acrobatic skills, because after their coffins were opened, bullets were visible in their backs.
In 2014, when I was reading the women’s magazine Kosovarja, the articles about these murders brought back memories of photos showing bodies of those Albanian soldiers, autopsied, with vertical incisions on their torsos. While reviewing archival materials, some corners of my memory were illuminated, black holes that had sucked up fragments and images of the past. Researching in the archives is like touching time itself, or perhaps some of its dimensions.
One response to these crimes, which was also one of the first joint initiatives of women, was a letter sent to the federal minister of defense, General Veljko Kadijević, and the president of the presidency of Yugoslavia, Janez Drnovšek, signed by 15 women known as the Albanian Intellectual Women. Not long after this letter, the Women’s Forum, which gathered many women and was led by Luljeta Pula, a university professor and one of the bravest politicians of the ‘90s, amid the many protests and letters at the time, made an appeal to the mothers of Yugoslavia to react and condemn the killings of soldiers.
Similar initiatives by mothers, who wrote petitions or protested against sending sons to war, were also present in other parts of Yugoslavia. However, they were not successful because a large majority of women chose national interests over the women’s cause.
Even during the outbreak of war in 1998-99, Prishtina experienced it the least compared to other areas of Kosovo, where there was armed resistance, like in Drenica, Llap, Dukagjin and beyond. Aware of this, some of us, when we talk about the '90s, speak in a mumbling way.
In 1991, Meti returned from emigration back to Prishtina and was arrested by the police for the second time. They had stopped him in the center of Prishtina, taken him into a building entrance, and during the search — usually hands against the wall, legs spread — they found a “dangerous” book. He doesn’t remember whether it was the magazine Alternativa or Blerim Shala’s book, “Kosovo, Blood and Tears,” published in 1990. They beat him in that entrance and at the police station until he lost consciousness. I learned these details much later, during the war. But I still remember the baton marks on his back, which I had seen stealthily. Our apartment was too small to hide the pain. Of all kinds, of everyone.
The first time Meti was arrested, when he was in high school, was during the protests in 1988, with dozens of other young people. I remember very little from that time. But, I do remember my grandmother whispering to herself, “I hope they haven’t killed him,” and that he did not return from the protest, and only on the next day, it was understood that he was at the police station. For us, this detention was a prison, and I knew what prison meant because my aunt, Shukrije Gashi, had been a political prisoner in the ’80s, and two of my uncles as well. Even though people didn’t talk openly about it in the early ’80s, I understood. Children don’t always need words to understand.
But these were among the few things that could have happened. Throughout the entire oppression in Yugoslavia, especially after the major riots, the most at-risk group was Albanians from other municipalities. For example, students who didn’t have permanent residence in Prishtina, but for them, Prishtina was the city of studies, and simultaneously the city of peril. Even during the outbreak of war in 1998-99, Prishtina experienced it the least compared to other areas of Kosovo, where there was armed resistance, like in Drenica, Llap, Dukagjin and beyond. Aware of this, some of us, when we talk about the ’90s, speak in a mumbling way.
The young Albanians migrated due to political and even economic reasons. Kosovo, as the poorest region in Yugoslavia, was already burdened by an economic crisis, and the mass dismissal from jobs made almost everyone even poorer, turning them into masters of improvisation. We couldn’t afford to buy everything in self-service stores. Our mothers would make us elderberry and nettle juice. It seemed to me that everything could be preserved in jars or barrels, from peppers to pears.
We spent quite a bit of time at home. For some of us, time would pass next to the phone, waiting for a connection. The signal was analog, and you’d often find several people on one line, so we’d pass the time saying things like, “Hang up a bit!” or “No, you hang up!” In the afternoons, one of us would use a hand mill to grind coffee. We all somehow patched things together. Among the neighbors, if you needed coffee or tea, an egg or some baking powder, the common phrase was “Do you happen to have any…?” That was pretty normal. Solidarity was another defining feature of that decade. My family told me that my uncle, at the very beginning, had brought us flour and oil. Then, we got out of the crisis by opening a mini-market, where all us kids worked in shifts. It could be said that that was my first job.
In the time between TV or radio news, we would play some video cassettes of films from Albania, which we either got from our uncles or from our neighbor across the hall, Uncle Syla, whose books I borrowed quite often, especially when I finished the ones from our home library. He kept a record of the borrowings in his thick-covered notebook. In the mornings, we’d watch musicals like “Hair,” and in the afternoons, “Two Gunshots in Paris,” a film that depicted the trial of national hero Avni Rrustemi for the assassination of Esat Pasha Toptani. I knew both of them by heart. Now, I laugh at the contrast, but still, both films have something in common — efforts for freedom — one individual, the other national. We’d also watch concerts, like Pink Floyd’s “Live in Pompei” and other bands’ concerts that Meti collected fanatically as VHS tapes. During this period, especially in the latter half of the ‘90s, we competed with MTV against news channels. This period came back to me in more detail during the pandemic in March 2020, when I was looking for the songs we used to listen to in the ’90s. It must have been because the lockdown reminded me of that state of emergency, curfews and war.
Solidarity, this core element of survival, provided social security, especially through the social reproduction of women.
As if social isolation itself wasn’t enough, I would scratch through the past with songs, thinking of it as a form of relaxation. Unconsciously, I must have been trying to find the meaning of the present through the past, because that’s what I knew, while the future seemed entirely uncertain.
On one of the first days of the lockdown, I went to buy groceries. While I was looking at the products and watching people grabbing a lot of food, just like in the early and late ’90s, I spotted a jar on a shelf that, like many others, was empty. At first, I thought someone had second thoughts about buying the jar and didn’t return it to the right shelf. When I touched the cold glass, in that split second, like in a movie scene, I saw an image of myself back then: skinny, pale, with a jar in my hand, standing near our car in a line in March 1999. But now, I was in Graz, scared, though I wasn’t sure if it was more because of the virus or the idea that there was a high chance that I would not be able to return to Prishtina for a long time. I had felt that same fear on March 31, 1999, when I had written in my journal: “I might never see Kosovo again… .” I was buying jars and canned food, just like we did in the ’90s, but the fear couldn’t be canned.
My friend, Merita, who also lives in Graz, had phoned me. “Eli, don’t worry about food, we’ve got enough,” she said — “we,” meaning her and her family. Solidarity, just like in the ’90s. This core element of survival provided social security, especially through the social reproduction of women. And memory? Well, it had already, selectively, burst open the airtight lids again.
I understood what had been in the jars, both then and now: red beets.
The “L-walk”
It must have been the mid-2000s when I went to Belgrade for the second time. The first time was in February 1999, when I traveled to Norway to take part in the International Student Festival in Trondheim (ISFIT). My flight was from Belgrade, which meant that both on the way there and on the way back, I had to spend the night in Belgrade. There was a war going on in Kosovo, and I had no idea whether it would be safe to stay in Belgrade. My Aunt Shuki told me, “you can stay at Lepa Mlađenović’s place.”
Shuki, a feminist activist who was a journalist at the time and worked for the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms (CDHRF), came to know Lepa — a prominent feminist, anti-war activist and psychologist — through the feminist network Women in Black and other collaborations between feminists in Prishtina and Belgrade. Among other things, Lepa had written about the injustice Shuki had suffered — like many former political prisoners, she was denied the right to a passport for nearly two decades. When I walked into Lepa’s office, I saw large banners that she and her comrades, including Staša Zajević and others, had repeatedly taken to Belgrade’s squares to protest against the war in Kosovo. It was a moment that left a deep impression on me. It shattered and reshaped some of the boundaries that time and circumstance — and, to put it mildly, the indifference of certain intellectuals in Belgrade — had built within me.
Sometime in the late ‘90s, Shuki and Nazlie Bala — who was also a feminist activist, working at the CDHRF at the time and later the founder of the organization Elena — attended a feminist event in Belgrade. A Serbian “feminist,” not like Lepa and her comrades, said to Shuki and Nazlie, “what’s your problem, you Albanians? You have a university, just study in Serbian.”
For them, and generally in Yugoslavia, a “šiptarka” was seen as primitive, uneducated, wearing a headscarf, having many children — something that Serbia viewed as a politically motivated increase in birth rates.
I experienced this same “lack of information” and colonialist attitude in Hungary in the mid-’90s, also at a feminist event. One of these “feminists” was astonished that I, a “šiptarka,” could express myself better in English than in Serbian and on top of that, played the saxophone.
For them, and generally in Yugoslavia, a “šiptarka” was seen as primitive, uneducated, wearing a headscarf, having many children — something that Serbia viewed as a politically motivated increase in birth rates. In reality, demographic analyses showed that birth rates were linked to women’s economic status and social class position. In families where women were employed, the number of children was lower than in those engaged in agriculture. And this wasn’t just the case in Kosovo, but also, in Vojvodina, the other autonomous province.
During colonization in the interwar period, settlers referred to Albanians using slurs like “Turé,” a pejorative form of Turk; “zhugana,” meaning mangy or filthy; and savages. By the late 1980s and beyond, all these racist labels had been condensed into “šiptari.” After World War II, particularly in the 1960s, “šiptar” was also used to differentiate between Albanians from Albania — referred to as “Albanci” — and Albanians from Kosovo because, to many, we Kosovar Albanians were not considered “real” Albanians. This is why the unification of the Albanian language at the 1972 Albanian Orthography Congress in Tirana was seen as such a major victory. Among other things, it invalidated the impact of this falsehood.
Anti-Albanian racism began to be recognized as such by some Yugoslav intellectuals, albeit only a few. Upon returning from Kosovo in 1989, Iztok Tory, a Slovenian theater director, wrote in an article for the magazine Alternativa that discovering open racism against Albanians was shocking for his generation because they knew of such phenomena in Africa and the U.S., whereas they had lived completely oblivious to it right in their midst, in Yugoslavia. He recalled and reproachfully questioned his generation’s stance toward the term “šiptar.” The realization that they had fallen into a propaganda trap, believing what they had been told about Albanians “down there” as “primitive and incapable people […] who do nothing but slaughter everything around them,” only began to take hold when Albanians who had moved to Slovenia spoke to Slovenians in their own language, Slovenian.
The "L-walk" came from the letter L, resembling the movement of the knight in chess, something my father had taught me back in the early or mid-’90s.
As is often the case, the creation of the “other” — through racism and an emphasis on differences rather than similarities — is aimed at instilling fear, through which oppression and crime is justified, in the name of protection.
Back in the mid-2000s, on the last day of my second visit to Belgrade, as I was walking back to the hotel, a police patrol appeared in front of me. They were just doing their job, and of course, had no idea I was Albanian — but the Albanian in me had certain impulses when seeing the police, like changing direction. Even though it had been a while since I had seen Serbian police, the moment I saw them on that day, the “L-walk” came to mind, almost like a command. The “L-walk” came from the letter L, resembling the movement of the knight in chess, something my father had taught me back in the early or mid-’90s. During those difficult times, because of the political and economic situation, he would often wake up in the middle of the night, and I’d be up too. He no longer scolded me for not sleeping. It had almost become a habit for us to either play chess or at least pretend to. So, navigating the city — whether escaping or returning from demonstrations, or just in everyday life — meant taking side streets or changing routes to avoid encounters with police patrols or checkpoints. And this act of avoiding, of maneuvering, I called the “L-walk.”
This wasn’t just a trait of my generation. Members of the Ilegale, when pursued by the police and the state secret service (UDB), were forced to operate underground. Their movements went far beyond the “L-walk.” They would slip through backyard gates, house doors and fences, doing whatever it took to avoid falling into the regime’s hands. We, too, had learned certain alleyways in the neighborhoods and passages through building entrances and courtyards.
Whenever I found myself doing the “L-walk,” I imagined myself as an armored knight, weaving through the hidden corners of the city where I was born and raised. Thus, in my mind, I created a map of what remained of the city as a consequence of ethnic segregation.
We liked these Albanian names for parts of the city, like “Qafa” — the Neck — and “Kurrizi” — the Backbone — because we said that the city, after all, is ours, since without a neck or a backbone, nobody can move.
The segregation began in the 1980s when Serbia considered that Kosovo should be de-Albanianized. The marked crescendo of this process started with the removal of autonomy. It began with the renaming of streets, squares and institutions, and even the construction of Orthodox churches, such as the one right in the middle of the University of Prishtina campus. In Prishtina only, within a short period, the Serbian regime renamed 7,000 streets, schools and institutions. Statues and monuments were replaced with those of Serbian historical figures, and new ones were built. This type of reconfiguration of a city inevitably led to ethnic segregation, except in some residential areas where Albanians and Serbs lived, usually in the collective buildings of socialism.
Spatial segregation also occurred because none of the buildings of public institutions and hospitality facilities, most of which were in the city center, had any Albanian employees. Our cultural and social life took place in spaces assigned to us, such as Kurrizi, Qafa and a corridor between buildings in the Dardania neighborhood known as “Santeja,” after a nearby cafe called Santé. In these locations, in the absence of proper facilities, exhibitions, literary events and concerts were organized. And on some occasions, even theater shows, when it wasn’t possible to perform in Dodona Theater, the puppet theater that had been spared from complete occupation. We liked these Albanian names for parts of the city, like “Qafa” — the Neck — and “Kurrizi” — the Backbone — because we said that the city, after all, is ours, since without a neck or a backbone, nobody can move.
The city looked different due to the posters of Serbian political parties and nationalist graffiti, which were another visual reminder of Serbian oppression and hegemony. What I remember are slogans like “Srbija do Tokija” (Serbia to Tokyo), one in English: “I am not just perfect, I am a Serb too” and “Ovo je Srbija” (This is Serbia). In the case of the latter, beneath it later appeared another graffiti that said, “Ovo je zid, budalo!” (This is a wall, you fool!).
There were others too, like “Delije,” which I later realized was a group of football fans. Every time Serbia won a football or basketball game, gunfire was inevitable. It was wise, during those times, not to walk around the city, even if doing an “L-walk.”
Our graffiti was different. It was spring 1998, surely the second half of March, when Burim invited us, his friends — me, Vlora, Kushtrim and a few others that I don’t remember — to his house. I don’t recall if we discussed the idea of doing graffiti not only in “our” parts of the city but also in the center, or if it was an idea that Burim and Kushtrim had earlier. I only knew Kushtrim superficially at that time, but not long after, he became my boyfriend.
Later, we found out that both of our families from our mothers’ side had been former members of Ilegale and former political prisoners. Jokingly, we used to say that, in contrast to that generation, who wrote slogans with a brush and red paint, we had “advanced” and used spray paint, also red. Just like them, we wrote “Kosova Republikë,” for them a demand, for us an affirmation — since the Albanian members of the Provincial Assembly of Kosovo had declared Kosovo a republic on July 2, 1990. The will of the Albanians for a republic was further confirmed through a referendum held in 1991.
The strategy for our “illegal activity” was set: one would write, while the others would keep watch, and then we would switch. The signal that the police were approaching and we would need to disperse was the same as calling someone. We decided on the name “Fis.” One evening, after writing in several places, we decided to write “Give peace a chance” on the wall of Xhevdet Doda school, in the center of the city. This time, it was Kushtrim’s turn to write, and I, along with Burim, would keep watch. When he started writing the sentence, which seemed the longest one in the world to me that evening, as if from the sky, a police marica — a riot van — appeared, one of those vans with grills that came down from the student cafeteria. I don’t know if it was fear or adrenaline, but when I started yelling “Fis,” my voice came out with such a vibration that any folk singer would have envied. Kushtrim turned his head, continued writing and laughed, “What about Fis?” imitating my voice. He finished the sentence, the marica went on its way toward the post office, and we continued on to Santeja, laughing at my “F-i-i-i-s” vibrato refrain.
After the liberation, in June 1999, my imaginary lines for the segregated city began to converge. For the first time, with Kushtrim, I was able to enter many public institutions. For the first time, at 20, I was rediscovering the city. This time round, without the need to do the “L-walk.”
The silences and the noises of a decade of resistance in various forms, which the city, along with our bodies, had absorbed, were coming to an end, and with it, the century as well.
We were free, or at least, partially so.
Feature image: The background image of a poisoned student and the title “Kosova” in handcuffs are works of Faik Krasniqi during the ’90s.
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