The murder of 49-year-old Arlinda Zekaj has enraged all of Kosovo and has now reached all the corners of the diaspora on social media. As a son of the Albanian diaspora, with my heart firmly in Kosovo, I cannot help but draw on my experience in Norway, where I was born and raised. Sadly, femicide remains a problem in Norway too. Luckily for Kosovo, others have had this debate before, and their experience is worth learning from.

On the evening of October 25, Arlinda was killed in her own home, minutes after the police had escorted her there. Her brother-in-law is the suspect. Nine days earlier, a court in Peja had issued a protection order against her ex-husband and ordered that she be allowed back into her home, where her son also lived. On October 22, she wrote to the prosecution herself and warned that the institutions responsible were failing her. That same day, a prosecutor judged that going home could put her life at risk. On the night she died, she told the police she did not feel safe. She was offered a shelter. But her son was home, and the court told her that it was her home too.

The institutions knew. The court knew, the prosecution knew and the police knew. She did everything right, yet the system failed her. And Arlinda is not the only one. In the first 10 months of this year, another seven women were killed in Kosovo. If this had happened only once, it would have been a tragic mistake. When it happens repeatedly, it is a failure of the system itself.

In the coming days, many articles and social media posts will be written about Arlinda. Many will be fuelled by fury and despair, and understandably so. Some will argue that the murder reveals a deeper cultural problem, and they may well be right.

I would rather look past the despair and past the cultural explanations and focus on the very institutions that exist to protect the rights and freedoms of the people of Kosovo. I still have hope in the justice system. What can the lawmakers, the police and the system as a whole do, regardless of cultural tendencies? After all, cultural problems can only do damage if the justice system allows it.

What Norway learned the hard way

In 2023, 17 people in Norway were killed by a current or former partner. That is more than twice the usual number. Behind the numbers were stories that sounded painfully familiar to Arlinda’s. In several cases, the killer had repeatedly broken a restraining order. In others, the woman had gone to the police, but was not taken seriously. At the start of 2024, Rahavy Varatharajan was killed after having asked the police for protection for months. Norway was shocked. The anger spread from families and activists to the media and parliament, and the question everyone asked was the same one Kosovo is asking now: how could the system let this happen?

The first measure was a permanent commission that reviews every single partner killing. Its job is not to find someone to blame, but to find out where the system failed and how to prevent the next death.

Its findings are made public. That openness matters. If culture plays a part in these killings, we need to understand how. The same goes for money, and the deep economic inequality between men and women in Kosovo. A lack of economic independence puts women in danger and makes them far more vulnerable to violence. If the system fails, we need to know where. Neither is possible without transparency. It allows the police, courts and politicians to learn, and the public to hold them to account. Kosovo owes Arlinda the same. The least the state can do now is find out how this was allowed to happen, and to tell the truth to the public.

Arlinda did everything right, but the system did not

A member of the Albanian diaspora reflects on the institutional failures that led to Arlinda Zekaj’s murder and the measures Norway has taken to prevent such deaths.

Armin Braimi