Spaces of hope, solidarity and resistance
What were the '90s and what can they teach us?
By Linda Gusia | March 18, 2024
In the early ‘90s, sunset usually meant that we should all be locked at home. Pounding pots and keys from our windows and balconies, like prisoners, made us present during the 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew in the militarized city of Prishtina. Sometimes, we would also turn off all the lights in our homes at exactly 7:30 p.m., just in time for the main evening news, to protest the Serbian state media propaganda, particularly following the closure of all but one Albanian-language media outlet. These kinds of symbolic protest made us audible, forged a sense of belonging and released some of the anger.
What has come to be known simply as the ’90s in Kosovo was a decade of profound structural and cultural shifts, shaped by precarity, state violence and adversity. The revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989 marked the beginning of the end for Yugoslavia, and the unfolding events laid bare the Serbian nationalist claim that Albanians were the ultimate “other” — sub-human barbarians whose participation in Yugoslav modernity, or even existence, was permissible only under Serbian rule.
This colonial logic was inherited from Yugoslavia’s structural conditions, as Albanians were systematically excluded from rights and self-governance. The 1974 Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had granted Kosovo autonomy, which included some individual and collective legal and political rights like access to higher education in the Albanian language, creating a middle class that by the 1980s started governing major institutions in Kosovo. Yet, structural inequalities persisted. Othering fueled economic and political marginalization, making Kosovo the poorest region, with the highest unemployment and one of the most vulnerable populations, in Yugoslavia.
This underlying oppression and racialization constituted the basis for the social construction and reproduction of discrimination, particularly with the rise of Slobodan Milošević’s regime. Milošević, a banker turned politician, became the head of the Serbian socialist party in 1987, riding a nationalist sentiment amplified by the struggling economy, which was marked by high inflation, unemployment and foreign debt.
Belgrade, under Milošević, had already set its course.
His April 1987 speech in Fushë Kosovë, outside Prishtina, to around 15,000 Serb nationalists, unsatisfied with the bad economy and blaming the Albanian majority for taking their jobs, heralded the end of the socialist era. His speech’s key sound bite, “No one will ever beat you again,” marked the beginning of a new period — one of changing the power balance in the federation, which consisted of six republics and two autonomous provinces, into one of centralizing power in Serbia. Milošević was setting the stage for his later political dominance and the nationalist policies that led to Kosovo’s loss of autonomy in 1989.
Yet, as new political restrictions took hold, resistance and mobilization were mounting, taking on new urgency in the face of escalating repression. In November 1988, as Milošević tightened his grip, a first large-scale mobilization emerged in opposition. Nearly 3,000 miners — embodiments of the socialist ideal of Yugoslav labor — set out on foot from the Trepça mines in Stan Terg, Mitrovica toward Prishtina, a distance of about 45 kilometers. Wrapped in layers against the November chill, they carried banners, Yugoslav and Albanian flags and a portrait of Tito, marching in defense of something they refused to relinquish: Kosovo’s autonomy.
Belgrade, under Milošević, had already set its course. By March 23, 1989, as the Kosovo Assembly convened under extraordinary conditions to ratify the constitutional amendments, Prishtina’s streets were lined with tanks. Inside the Assembly, Kosovo’s autonomy was dismantled — the culmination of an ideological project that sought to redefine Albanians as outsiders within the Yugoslav federation.
With the abolition of Kosovo’s autonomy, martial law was imposed — creating a de facto “state of emergency” that entrenched an apartheid system of ethnic segregation and systematic state violence. New legal frameworks quickly followed, with the Serbian Parliament approving constitutional amendments. Cynically titled policies like the “Plan for Peace, Freedom, Equality, Democracy and Prosperity in Kosovo” laid the groundwork for sweeping state control across all sectors, from factories to police forces.
All forms of public and institutional life were militarized: tanks and police patrolled day and night, racially profiling Albanians; police forces took over RTP, Prishtina’s radio and television station, stopping all broadcasts in Albanian; almost all government employees began to be removed from state institutions like the judicial system, banks and local police forces.
Under Milošević’s authoritarian regime, crowds were also deemed illegal; no more than three people could walk together in public spaces. No one was left outside the omnipresent totality of segregation and exclusion. Kosovo became a divided place: Serbs, less than 10% of the population, held power in all institutions, while Albanians were completely subjugated.
State violence and racialization in the 1990s, enforced through heavy military and police presence, left no room for Albanians within the newly established authoritarian regime. Faced with systematic exclusion and the absence of legal or institutional recourse, Albanians turned to organized civil resistance, rooted in principles of human rights and nonviolent struggle. Refusing the authority of Milošević’s authoritarian regime and the Yugoslav state — which by 1992 was reduced to Serbia and Montenegro — Kosovo declared independence from Serbia and Yugoslavia, ratified a new constitution, established numerous political parties, including the Green Party, elected literary critic Ibrahim Rugova as president and established a taxation system. That system, the 3% Fund, brought in the diaspora to support the infrastructure of peaceful resistance.
Rather than framing its demands in narrow nationalist terms, the movement positioned itself within discourses of democracy and freedom, both to mobilize international solidarity and to remain committed to nonviolence. The resistance was peaceful, mainly for pragmatic reasons — challenging and breaking the prevailing prejudices of Albanians as “primitive” and “violent” — but mainly wanting to avoid further escalation of violence.
These formal structures of resistance and political action only became possible through solidarity interwoven in everyday forms of lived defiance, whether through underground schools and health care networks or collective pounding of pots and keys against the silence of occupation. The women’s movement, in particular, was a striking example of how solidarity became embedded in daily acts of resistance, creating spaces of subversions and defying the totality of segregation. Simultaneously, however, women’s activism and solidarity in the ‘90s has been silenced in historical accounts of resistance. This piece brings the feminist movement’s events and actors into focus by emphasizing the power that context and solidarity played during the decade.
Towards the politics of hope
At the turn of the decade in Kosovo, the first reaction to the abolition of autonomy, mass firings of workers, closure of the University of Prishtina and Albanian-language high schools and systematic police violence against all sectors of society, was months of massive protests. Police met these protests with brute force and mass imprisonment. It was reported that between January and February 1990, at least 30 Albanian demonstrators were killed and over 1,000 were imprisoned. The police response carried one message: we were all under suspicion and already found guilty by just being there.
Strikes, often organized through unions, became a major form of resistance. On September 3, 1990, a general strike was called across all Kosovo Albanian workers. My mother and her co-workers were among the participants. She was subsequently dismissed from her workplace, as was the case for many who participated. Meanwhile, new directors were appointed under repressive measures — particularly in the education sector — and workers were pressured to pledge loyalty to the new laws. Participating in strikes and refusing to comply often led to dismissal.
Fusing disobedience with a kind of do-it-yourself logic, a new infrastructure of mobilization and a new system of pushing back emerged as a reaction.
The mass expulsion from the workforce was carried out under the pretext of economic reduction — notoriously called “technological sufficiency” — which somehow only affected Albanian workers. In 1990 alone, an estimated 45% of the 164,210 Kosovo Albanian workers lost their jobs under these measures. Ultimately, almost 90% of Kosovo Albanians were fired. As Albanians were never fully integrated into the labor market in the socialist system to begin with, mass firings left Albanians without any social and health security, pension insurance, allowances or social benefits. All state support was lost.
Kosovo Albanians found themselves fighting for survival, creating interdependencies that strengthened the sense of community. Fusing disobedience with a kind of do-it-yourself logic, a new infrastructure of mobilization and a new system of pushing back emerged as a reaction.
When doctors were blocked from practicing medicine, they continued in makeshift clinics, and offered their services in private spaces or went to homes in rural communities and those of the most marginalized. Creating alternative spaces to practice medicine and continue educating young medical students enabled another important infrastructure. Throughout the decade, successive cohorts of healthcare providers were educated in such spaces. Additionally, many private clinics started operating.
When we were banned from entering schools, our teachers would invite us to their living rooms for afternoon classes and homemade cookies, intuitively starting what came to be known as the new house school system. Over 3,000 private spaces — houses, garages, mosques and churches — were turned into classrooms by 1992.
With schools and universities closed to Albanians, a self-organized education system built on solidarity emerged in the 1990s. Private homes and apartments became makeshift classrooms, ensuring that education continued despite state repression. Photos courtesy of Agim Sylejmani.
The system depended on many elements. It rested on the deep solidarity of teachers, who for the first years were not paid, and later received modest payment from the 3% Fund. It relied on parents, who donated wood for heating and built chairs and tables. It relied on students to clean up the classrooms after themselves, including washing the house windows on Saturdays. It relied on community building, as we created our own school newspapers, such as Feniksi, and as high school students, we would visit small Albanian-owned shops and businesses, asking for modest financial contributions to support the printing costs. Most importantly, the house school system relied on people generously opening their homes for nearly a decade.
When Albanians were barred from the theater, galleries and concerts, spaces like Dodona Theater emerged as alternative sites of resistance. Dodona was originally a puppet theater, established in 1987, in a small space with one stage and 167 seats. It operated in peculiar circumstances, in one of Prishtina’s narrow, small streets, somehow managing to operate beneath the regime’s radar, mostly thanks to the fame and geniality of actor and director Faruk Begolli.
Begolli, a prominent actor in Yugoslav cinematography, found a way to rent the space, which under special measures was not used much. Moreover, due to his star status, he managed to convince the Serb director and ever-present police that the shows put on were just comedies, and that people were just having a laugh. He used humor as a form of subversion, and together with actor and director Melihate Qena and many others, led the puppet theater and created a theater of resistance.
Dodona Theater housed puppet shows for children during the daytime, and was used as a concert hall for emerging bands. It was also a home away from home for the Kosovo theater, which had closed, and a school for new actors and directors. It sustained itself through ticket sales from popular performances. Going to the theater also became an act of political disobedience, a performance of individual and collective agency through simply being in a crowd that didn’t involve direct protest and clashes with police. Dodona Gallery also operated and had exhibitions in the neighborhood from 1997, giving space specifically to young visual artists so that they could exhibit and sell their work. Art students’ graduation exhibitions were also often exhibited in Dodona Gallery.
Another space of resistance was the well-known restaurant Hani i dy Robertëve, a cafe and gathering space for exhibitions, solo performances and public readings. Artists like Sokol Beqiri, Gjellosh Gjokaj and Zake Prelvukaj, whose works defied repression and kept artistic expression alive, had their art exhibited there. It was also a home to poets like Ali Podrimja, whose work on identity and displacement spoke to the resilience many relied on during that time. Many of Kosovo’s painters, philosophers and intellectuals also sought refuge in its space. It became a place where journalists, diplomats and all who visited Kosovo would visit regularly. It even staged Václav Havel’s “Audience,” directed by Fatos Berisha, a play whose themes of compliance and resistance made it a fitting act of defiance.
Hidden in narrow streets and city outskirts, coffee shops and small restaurants became galleries and concert halls, spaces for debate and resistance. Everything was taking place in semi-private and small spaces, creating an underground culture and magnifying a sense of claustrophobia. Video clubs, popping up in all neighborhoods, would rent pirated but mostly up-to-date Hollywood films; videocassettes with curated mixes were also passed to one another. Home videos and DVDs were smuggled back and forth on buses by the growing diaspora, showing everyday life on both ends, somehow fighting extreme isolation.
Meanwhile, small private garages and small bars for those with the taste for metal music and grunge catered to growing music fans developing a new subculture, with music-making and live music performance becoming two of the few underground activities available for young people in the ’90s. Prishtina youth, in particular, formed a subculture mimicking music and fashion featured on films, and from watching MTV, claiming spaces they were completely excluded from.
Sharing an egg, a cup of flour, a book, a recipe or a videocassette became a daily ritual, a way of sharing the struggles of oppression.
Isolation, unemployment and confinement at home due to police violence and constant curfews imposed the demand for compulsive news watching and entertainment distraction, making satellite antennas the only form of communication with the world. Most of us didn’t have a passport and travel usually occurred in only one way: illegally. Satellite antennas, which became a new decoration for the city, brought the world to our living rooms, or more precisely, our neighborhoods. Satellite antennas, like everything else, were to be shared with neighbors. This forced us to learn English and German, and endure the tastes and preferences of neighbors kind enough to share the cable from the satellite dish.
The neighborhood community, bound together by scarcity, became a source of support and solidarity. Sharing an egg, a cup of flour, a book, a recipe or a videocassette became a daily ritual, a way of sharing the struggles of oppression. In my neighborhood, Dardania, almost every day at 11 a.m., women from my apartment building, who were now mostly unemployed, gathered for coffee and tea. This ritualized coffee drinking was a way of implementing the politics of care, sharing and checking in on each other’s wellbeing, sharing the burden of reproductive labor by strategizing about being frugal.
Creating these communities of care and alliances of solidarity moved beyond apartment buildings toward semi-formal structures, known colloquially as “committees of solidarity.” These loosely organized groups operated on the principle of “a family helps a family,” providing food, clothing and other essential support to those most in need. Being in direct touch with the community, these groups had a clearer sense of the needs, enabling them to connect with larger humanitarian organizations, like the Mother Teresa Society and the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms, which documented the repression and violence.
Daily resistance, performed through expressions of care, sharing, hope and maintenance, was consciously subversive.
Daily resistance, performed through expressions of care, sharing, hope and maintenance, was consciously subversive and remains one of most unaccounted for parts of the fabric of the ’90s. Behind a collective euphoria to join political parties, build and maintain the infrastructures of house school education system, health care system and participate in protest, were kitchen tables. They were frequently the very places that initiated such politics, a space for making politics and being political.
Women’s activism and solidarity
The location from which women speak is often hidden from view and continues to be omitted and unrecognized in historical accounts. The brutal collapse of social infrastructures changed society’s texture; it pushed women, especially from rural areas, further into domesticity, at the mercy of patriarchal family structures and isolation. However, the decade also put many women on the forefront of community building, grounding their activism in mutual aid and practicing solidarities.
Being pushed out of institutions and public space motivated women’s voluntarism and community care, creating solid ground for politicization and the women’s movement to flourish. Within these formations, under conditions of state violence, women demanded a radical transformation of society. They embraced a new identity shaped by increased activism — as something new and outside of the control of political parties, and as something that offered them agency and gave them legitimacy and hope in their communities. As the prominent activist Sevdije Ahmeti said in a 2015 interview: “We called ourselves activists. Activists of human rights and women’s rights, we were active in resisting the Milošević regime, and active in our communities.”
Internationalizing the cause of civil resistance and struggles in Kosovo was one of the tenets of ’90s resistance, and here, women took the lead. They networked regionally and internationally, forging alliances among themselves and with women in the region and beyond.
As such, new spaces surfaced, allowing women to experience being politically active as never before. When a group of women activists from Prishtina attended the World Conference on Human Rights held by the U.N. in Vienna in 1993, they stumbled upon an international framework and vocabulary applicable to what they were already doing at home. It intersected with the discourse of peaceful resistance and grammar of rights, freedoms, democracy and self-determination that the peaceful movement in Kosovo embodied.
This conference paved the way for the emerging international discourse on human rights, particularly the framing of women’s rights as human rights. The slogan “women’s rights are human rights” was comprehensible and tangible in Kosovo’s social and political context. Kosovo’s women were already working within this framework, even though it emerged as a significant principle of wider feminist practice in the ‘90s. In a 2014 interview, Sevdije recalled that as Kosovo Albanian women were stripped of all their rights, the basic demand that human rights be respected emerged across Kosovo. New spaces surfaced with this vision of women’s activism and solidarity and the support of global feminist solidarity.
In 1993, Sevdije and human rights activist Vjosa Dobruna received a small donation after an international feminist gathering in Italy. They expressed the need for a women’s center in Prishtina. A crowdfunding event was organized in support and a small donation gathered a couple months’ worth of rent for the Center for Protection of Women and Children, which became a landmark of the feminist movement in Prishtina in the ’90s. The center was created to provide a safe space for women, offering gynecological and pediatric care, serving as a space for women to talk about their everyday struggles and a center for documenting human rights violations. It was also a place for feminist workshops. In other words, it was a space for organizing and being active.
Women activists made spaces for other women and girls, which would exceed the limits of temporality and reconnect across age, class and ethnicity.
Solidarity has always been at the heart of feminist practice, becoming a central component of global feminism at the end of the 20th century. The experience of Black feminism and women in colonial contexts spoke to the multiplicity of struggles and the necessity of interconnections with other movements. As feminist writer Audre Lorde put it in a talk at Harvard University for Black History Month in 1982, “There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Moreover, viewing solidarity as a political practice requires moving beyond a basic understanding of solidarity as mere compassion. Similarly, author and theorist bell hooks argued, “Solidarity is not the same as support. … Solidarity requires sustained, ongoing commitment.”
Women in Kosovo, through new feminist networks, created friendships, shared experiences, resources and skills, giving one another the space and legitimacy, internationally and locally. This strategy involved uniting in community building, aid, education, raising awareness and consciousness, petitioning, organizing, documenting violence, protesting, translating and creating local and international networks of solidarities. Moreover, women activists made spaces for other women and girls, which would exceed the limits of temporality and reconnect across age, class and ethnicity, by sharing strategies, skills and, most importantly, by evoking hope.
My first personal recollection of the Center for Protection of Women and Children came as a teen in 1996, during my very first feminist workshop on peaceful conflict resolution, co-organized with Women in Black from Belgrade. I remember carefully pushing aside the closet that hid the door to the basement, a space where I met and befriended some of the incredible feminists at the forefront of women’s movement.
Among them were Sevdije and Vjosa, founders and leaders of the center, who were among the first women to travel across Kosovo to document and support women who had survived sexual violence by the military. Igballe Rogova and Safete Rogova founded Motrat Qiriazi and located their activism in rural countryside, which they later learned to be grassroots feminist activism. In the Has region specifically, they worked closely with women on various issues, producing radio theater shows, a women’s newspaper and focused on girls’ education. They introduced prizes for the best poetry and prose, giving women a platform and encouraging them to find their voice.
Motrat Qiriazi organized activities including theater and newspaper production in Kosovo’s Has region during the 1990s. Photos courtesy of Safete Rogova.
Other women in the movement included Shukrije Gashi, a feminist activist and a poet imprisoned for her political activism in the ‘80s, and Nora Ahmetaj, a feminist and human rights activist, who were among the women documenting systematic human rights violations and writing and networking in regional feminist networks. Both were part of the feminist, anti-war Women in Black network in the ‘90s, which protested militarism, nationalism and state violence through silent vigils and other acts of civil resistance throughout the region. There was Naxhije Buçinca, an educator and one of the founders of the Kosovo Democratic League (LDK)’s women’s forum, who with her husband co-founded Creators and Veterans of Education in Kosovo, working primarily in education and eradication of illiteracy. Meanwhile, Sazana Çapriqi, a professor of literature, was a founder of Sfinga, one of the first feminist publication series. Sfinga not only published original work on gender, but it also translated iconic feminist literature by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Audre Lorde into Albanian.
These were just some among the many incredible women engaged in the movement. Together, they gathered often in the center’s basement, even in the late ‘90s, to organize some of the most prominent women’s protests and write reports that they would disseminate internationally. It was a space of solidarity, network and resistance.
The Women’s Forum of the LDK was closely aligned with the party itself, while the League of Albanian Women — led by by Flora Brovina, Greta Kaçinarin, Sanije Gashi, Afërdita Saraçini Kelmendi, Kimete Agaj and Hanumshahe Iliazi — organized most women’s protests in the early ‘90s. Meanwhile, a more feminist strand emerged through organizations like Motrat Qiriazi, Women in Black, Elena and the Women Humanitarian Association; by 1997, a significant number of nongovernmental organizations focused on women.
I went to the center as a member of another woman’s organization, Media Project, which was founded by Xheraldina Buçcinca Vula and Afërdita Saraçini Kelmendi. In 1995, Media Project’s early days, it brought together dozens of teen girls, who would meet at the kitchen table and in living rooms of Xheraldina’s and Afërdita’s houses. They created a crucial space for young girls who otherwise completely lacked spaces to gather and learn. We, a group of around a dozen high school girls, met regularly and had informal classes and training in journalism, computers, photography and peaceful conflict resolution. There was also the occasional reading of feminist poetry written by Shukrije and Xheraldina. It was a space for sharing skills, empowerment and creating community.
By the mid ‘90s, in a shifting local and regional political landscape, women activists faced tensions both locally and internationally. As women’s struggles in Kosovo were deeply intertwined with national struggles, expanding and practicing solidarity was sometimes difficult to put into practice. It was a challenging balancing act for activists telling their experiences and struggles to an audience often skeptical of the feminist movement’s entanglement with national liberation.
Women activists of the ’90s were constantly challenged, both locally and internationally, to situate their struggle within either the peaceful resistance movement or international women’s movement. In 1995, the Center for Protection of Women and Children, began conducting research specifically on women’s lives in Kosovo. Researching women’s lives, health, economy and family planning was criticized by some political elites as untimely and unnecessary amid the national liberation struggle at hand. Conversely, the national report prepared for the Fourth World Conference on Women convened by the U.N. in Beijing in 1995, authored by Sevdije, Afërdita, Edita Tahiri and Mustafe Blakaj, faced international criticism for focusing too much on repression against Kosovo Albanians and the general political circumstances in Kosovo, rather than the specific position of women in Kosovo.
These examples illustrate the burdens of “global sisterhood” and the difficulty of being grounded in local community work and engaging in international feminist networks during occupation. In addition, they illustrate the heterogeneity of the movement, both globally and in Kosovo. Feminist solidarity, in particular, must recognize the intersecting structures of oppression in women’s lives and be rooted in trust and allowing women to define struggles on their own terms.
Balancing community-grounded work and international networking required constant articulation and growth. As such, cultivating feminist consciousness went hand-in-hand with their lived experiences; women who went into community activism and political engagement came out of it altered.
This short snapshot illustrates one side of activism and the women’s movement in the ’90s, along with multiple solidarity’s potential for transformation. It also shows how duress can enable and unleash incredible mobilization. The streets, the other side of activism, were also spaces of appearance and amplification of women’s presence in the movement. Protest entailed the emergence of the bodies that mattered in the struggle.
By 1997, over a dozen nongovernmental organizations were working in Kosovo. These included:
– Motrat Qiriazi (1990) — Qiriazi Sisters
– Rrjeti i Motrave Serbe (1992) — Serbian Sisters Network
– Lidhja e Gruas Shqiptare (1992) — League of Albanian Women
– Mikja (1992) — Friend
– Krijueset dhe Veteranet të Arsimit të Kosovës (1993) — Creators and Veterans of Education in Kosovo
– Qendra për Mbrojtjen e Gruas dhe Fëmijës, QMGF (1993) — Center for the Protection of Women and Children
– Gratë në të zeza – Kosova (1994) — Women in Black – Kosovo
– Legjenda (1995) — Legend
– Media Project (1995)
– Aureola (1996)
– Elena (me vonë Liria) (1997) — Elena (later Freedom)
– Sfinga (1997) — Sphinx
Source: Farnsworth, N. (2008). History is Herstory Too: The History of Women in Civil Society in Kosovo, 1980-2004. Prishtina: Kosovar Gender Studies Centre.
Women protesting were a defining feature of the ’90s, yet they were and still are often unrecognized. The first protest was as early as 1990, when political tensions had already started to deepen and Yugoslavia was edging toward disintegration. That year, women gathered as mothers for peace and against violence.
On March 8, 1990, on top of Boro and Ramiz Youth Center, they read an open letter to Yugoslav leadership and military officials, requesting accountability for the killings of 54 young Albanian men — 18-year-old conscripts — who had died between 1981 to 1990 while serving their compulsory year in the Yugoslav army. The young men would come home in caskets after being killed, victims of bullying and racism.
A compilation of statements read at the March 8, 1990 protest:
“We, Albanian mothers, raise our voices and demand:
That the war in Croatia cease immediately,
That Albanian soldiers be treated equally to soldiers of other nations and nationalities in the country,
That the killing of Albanian soldiers be stopped,
That all Albanian soldiers currently imprisoned for deserting the ranks of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) or refusing military service be released, and that an amnesty be granted, while the persecution of Albanian soldiers by military and civilian police be halted,
That all Albanian soldiers fulfill their military service in Kosovo.”
(Tërmkolli, 2009, 97)
Silence was a defining element of all protests, including this one, as Afërdita recalled in an interview in 2016: “Fearing provocations that potential police infiltrators might cause, we told the women to stay silent so as not to provoke arrests. We had been questioned by the police that morning before the protests and knew they were looking for an excuse to arrest us. A single shout of ‘Kosovo Republic’ would have sent all the organizers to jail.”
While protests halted from 1992 to 1996 — due to the self-imposed limits of the peaceful resistance movement, which sought to avoid confrontation — silence remained prominent as women were the first to resume protests. Silence was a powerful symbol of composure and unity, with which women united citizens against violence and expanded the movement. A number of protests started as vigils and the silence echoed the grief, somber times and stoicism.
The signing of the 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was a key political event that pushed many activists to reevaluate their resistance strategies. In Kosovo, there were expectations that it would also provide a solution for Kosovo. Instead, it completely ignored the years of peaceful resistance and systematic violence. Kosovo was not even mentioned, and Milošević was declared a peacemaker. The international community’s complete omission of Kosovo deepened frustration.
On April 21, 1996, when Armend Daci, a medical student, was killed by a sniper in front of his apartment building, it revived chilling memories of snipers shooting civilians in the streets of Sarajevo in previous years. That evening, hundreds of women gathered in Prishtina’s Sunny Hill neighborhood, to light candles in the place Armend was killed and silently walked toward the city center, breaking the passive resistance mode of public gathering. Additionally, the University of Prishtina’s Independent Student Union called a protest on the evening of April 26, urging people across Kosovo to turn off their lights for five minutes and light candles at 9 p.m., just as they had done in 1990.
From then on, practices of taking back public space with peaceful protest constituted a shift in politics and mass mobilization in reaction to increasing violence. The police used force — tear gas, water cannons and real bullets — against protestors, returning to the final act of the drama of dismantling Yugoslavia. The increased violence changed the contours of peaceful resistance. Protesters began openly showing dissent, marking a shift in the mood towards armed defense.
By September 1997, the Independent Student Union began organizing walks in the city, after many years of absence from the streets. Walks were part of the process of taking back the streets; as crowds were deemed illegal, no more than two people could walk together in public spaces. It helped build the courage for protest and confrontation with the police and angry Serb civilians who would come up and beat you or run you over with the car during protests.
Soon after, a massive student protest on October 1 was organized, demanding that Albanian students be allowed access to University of Prishtina buildings. In November 1997, the Kosovo Liberation Army openly participated in a funeral of a murdered school teacher in Llausha village in central Kosovo, making its presence known both locally and internationally.
By 1998, the streets became a site for contesting brutal killings. The massacres in Drenica publicly displayed the kind of violence that the Milošević regime was capable of and planned to execute in the future. Protests were notable in that they showed dissent, while also augmenting the symbolic performance as a way of communicating to the outside world.
In the spirit of peaceful protests, women activists were also the first to react to the escalation of violence following the massacres of the Ahmeti and Jashari families in February and March 1998. The protection of families, women and children, as well as public mobilization in their support, reconciled the different approaches taken by women in the LDK Forum and women in civil society. Women united under the name Kosovo Women’s Network and began their public engagement together. March 1998 became the month when the women’s movement became more visible and active in public through protests.
Women-led protests in March 1998
This coming together faced with the real threat of war revealed their commitment to peace and actualization of their political agency. What needs to be underlined here is the heterogeneity of the movement and different positioning of various groups involved in women’s protest and the movement. This collective moment of action that emerged amid this struggle gave rise to a new symbolism, vocabulary, novel claims. Raising two fingers in the sign of victory and democracy became a signifier of collective protest, and, at times, even the way people greeted each other.
Recounting this period, one cannot help but notice the narrow place assigned to women in this political articulation. Women continued to protest, as mothers, strategically adjusting to patriarchal language, exploiting the normative patriarchal order of the police and population, which ascribed particular vulnerability to women’s bodies. While doing this, women did not just blindly follow a patriarchal script; the act of protest also subverted these norms, grew the movement and negotiated their positionality. Expanding modes of resistance by sharing resources, legitimacy, multiplicity of voices, they changed models of activism, negotiated belonging and ultimately shaped the resistance.
Sharing hope through solidarity
In thinking about the civil resistance movement and the women’s movement together, we make room for complexity in analysis. Doing so also stresses the interconnection between movements and strategies of resistance relevant today.
Writing about events that many of us local scholars have extensively researched and lived, one is caught between sharing too much or too little in the attempt to produce knowledge that also attempts to reclaim the importance of affective experiences. As a generation that witnessed such events and violence, we should insist on reclaiming agency and the necessity of purposefully illustrating multiple lines of resistance, discourses, spaces and, most importantly, solidarities that make the resistance possible.
As so many have pointed out, there is a lack of narrative and institutionalized politics of memorialization about the ‘90s. If I can stretch the allegory, the present very much resembles the ’90s, when we were the children of parents anxiously preoccupied with survival and transition during such difficult times and were left to make our own interpretations. Kosovo’s identity, possibility and existence as a country have probably been contested more often than affirmed in recent history. Once again, it is up to us to improvise, fill in the gaps of narrating, archiving, remembering and documenting. Paradoxically, allowing a multiplicity of voices and experiences to emerge again makes it a more democratic and plural process.
As a battle-seasoned generation, we refuse to narrow our experiences to few events and are aware that it takes strong and large communities to fight back. We know the desperation of being stripped of rights and living in violence, dehumanized and in states of emergencies, yet despite all odds being against us, we hoped and organized networks of solidarity. It is our burden to try to find ways to show the most important lesson we learned from the ’90s: that solidarity can bring us hope in these times of crisis. Sharing the experiences of the ’90s is really sharing strategies and hoping that some of the tactics might work in another context and in different times, offering a road map of lessons learned. We survived the ’90s and created an opportunity for the very possibility of resistance through solidarities. Solidarity invites us to link our visions for the future to one another. It is what Havel called the “power of the powerless.”
Feature image by Hazir Reka: The White Sheet Protest, held on March 8, 1998, in Prishtina, with the slogan “We stand strong at our doorsteps.” Around 20,000 women participated, and the white sheets symbolized “We want peace” and “We have nothing left to say.”
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