For most of my life, my sense of identity felt unshakable — like the foundation of a centuries-old monastery. As a daughter to first-generation Serbian Americans, pride in my heritage was how I resisted assimilation. But even the strongest structures develop cracks when they’re built on shaky grounds — especially when they rest upon the subjugation of another group of people.

Looking back, I can see when the cracks formed in the beliefs I held about Kosovo. Like a building demolition, the first serious blow to my preconceptions initiated the collapse of my nationalist worldview.

Growing up as the daughter of Serbian immigrants in the U.S., Serbian nationalism thrived in my environment, partly because I lived in the so-called “belly of the beast.” Due to the NATO bombing in Serbia in 1999, anti-American sentiment among Serbs became as omnipresent as the air we breathe. There was something about growing up in a country that bombed the place my family came from that instilled in me a profound sense of defiance.

My mother was born and raised in Kosovo, she passed down much of the standard Serbian ethnonationalist rhetoric to me. I was told that Kosovo was home to the oldest Serbian churches and monasteries and parroted the racist myth that Albanians stole it from us by having a higher birth rate than Serbs. As I was told growing up, the U.S. supposedly facilitated this “theft” of Serbian land and property, “killing 2,500 Serbian people in the process”. Given everything else I knew about U.S. foreign policy in other parts of the world, it was not hard for me to believe that this grave transgression had occurred.

Shortly after the 1998-99 war in Kosovo, the U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan — claiming to spread “freedom and democracy” while killing millions. I channeled my anger into activism, opposing U.S. interventions in Yemen, Syria and beyond.

I believed people deserve self-determination free from U.S. interference — a belief that soon clashed with my views on Kosovo.

As part of my activism, I wrote an article for a local publication in Boston about Serbia’s political situation. In it, I touched on the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia and regurgitated the pre-prepared talking points I had absorbed since childhood. The main focus was on delegitimizing the Albanian struggle by pointing to their collaboration with the U.S.

It was my U.S. anti-war comrades who questioned my biased recollection of this history. I highlighted the Serbian civilians killed in NATO’s bombing but did not utter a word about the oppression Kosovar Albanians had endured at the hands of the Serbian state.

In these preliminary discussions with my comrades, I repeated the arguments I had been taught to recite on cue: Kosovo illegally declared independence, the Serbian constitution affirms that Kosovo is part of Serbia and so on.

In response to all this legal jargon, my comrades asked a question that shook me to my core: What do the people who actually live in Kosovo want? In that moment, a spiderweb of cracks spread through the story I had been indoctrinated with about Kosovo.

It sounds so silly now, but sometimes the simplest questions have the power to break through deeply ingrained dogma.

A new understanding of my ties to Kosovo

For the first time, I was challenged on my narrow and contradictory approach to Kosovo. I then undertook something neither my family nor Serbian society had ever encouraged me to do: independently investigate Kosovo’s history.

Immediately, a few basic facts stunned me. After Serbia took control of Kosovo following the First Balkan War in 1912-1913, it worked to dismantle all aspects of Albanian identity and culture. Education in Albanian was eliminated, Albanian books and newspapers were suppressed and Albanian intellectuals, clergy and civic leaders were targeted. A Serbian official in 1921 stated Albanians should remain “unenlightened and backward” — a chilling insight into state intentions.

The question came to me, if “Kosovo is Serbia,” why were such repressive, violent and abhorrent actions required to make it Serbian?

I also learned that between 1918 and 1941, Serbia expelled 45,000 local Albanians and replaced them with 60,000 Serb settlers. This changed Kosovo’s ethnic demographic.  Even more unsettling was that my great-grandparents were among them. My grandfather later admitted to me that his parents moved from Montenegro to Kosovo in 1921 “for the state’s objective.”

So, what exactly was the state’s objective? Serbian politicians and officials made it clear: rid Kosovo of its Albanian population. In 1937, Vaso Čubrilović, a historian and former member of the Young Bosnia movement — which led the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand — wrote a policy proposal titled “The Expulsion of the Albanians”. He argued that Serbia’s colonization efforts had failed and that it was time to act “brutally.”

In 1920, just before my ancestors arrived, Serbia stripped Albanians of land and gave it to settlers. My family are from Obiliq, a Serbian settlement, established on top of the previous village of Gllobodericë, during Serbia’s colonization of Kosovo. It is highly likely that my family directly benefited from these oppressive policies.

I was horrified to realize my ancestors had participated in the very oppression I was fighting against. I had been lied to my entire life. Worse yet, the entire Serbian nation has been collectively lied to for over a century.

Digging behind the “why?”

Once I broke through the dam of unquestioned Serbian propaganda, one question haunted me: why did Serbs support these oppressive policies? Beyond morality, what did they gain from colonizing Kosovo?

In the short term, Serb settlers received land and privileges — but they didn’t act alone. It was the Serbian elite that truly profited, extracting wealth from Kosovo’s resources and exploiting Albanian labor.

That’s when I discovered Dimitrije Tucović, a Serbian socialist still honored with a street name in Prishtina after Kosovo’s independence in 2008. In 1914, just before being killed in WWI, he published “Serbia and Albania”, a scathing critique of Serbia’s expansionist policies.

Tucović saw that Serbia’s repression of Albanians served elites, not ordinary Serbs, who bore the costs of war — death, injury, poverty. Like many socialists, he recognized nationalism as a tool for aggressors to mislead the masses and obscure their true enemy. This divide and rule tactic has deep roots in the Balkans, culminating in the 1990s with communities turning on each other — resulting in war crimes, genocide and displacement — while elites in Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia escaped harm and profited from privatization. Today, the same strategy persists in Serbia, evident in the mass uprising sparked by the collapse of Novi Sad’s newly renovated railway station.

When students first started blockading their universities in response to the collapse of the recently renovated railway station canopy, my aunt was one of many who expressed her support for their efforts. However, she immediately amended her unconditional support of the students when Albin Kurti, the prime minister of Kosovo, came out in support of the students. 

Why? Oh of course, because if a Kosovar Albanian politician is supporting something in Serbia, then it must secretly be a conspiracy to sow chaos in Serbia. 

Cracks in Nationalism

This fear mongering benefits exactly one group of people in Serbia: the wealthy and powerful. For them, it is highly convenient to hide behind a flag of “national unity” to evade scrutiny and cast blame on the country’s issues onto external “enemies.” 

To be clear, I’m challenging the underlying belief that an entire nation of people, Kosovar Albanians in this instance, are our enemies. In fact, ordinary Serbs and Albanians in both countries have more in common with one another than the wealthy members of their respective societies. 

The average salaries of workers in both Serbia and Kosovo are less than 1,000 euros — an amount that is grossly inadequate to support a family in these current times of inflation and economic crisis. Our healthcare systems, housing and educational institutions continue to crumble while the wealthy in both countries only seem to get richer.  

But our struggles will never be able to merge into one if Serbs consistently negate the oppressive role that Serbia played in Kosovo. What’s more, Serbs who have roots to colonization in Kosovo, like I do, have an especially important role to play. It is not our fault that our ancestors participated in such oppression, but it is our responsibility to acknowledge the pain caused and work to mend the divides that our ancestors benefited from. 

This is of course not to deny that there were certainly moments when Serbs and other ethnicities suffered in Kosovo. I am in no way absolving any act of ethnically-motivated violence. 

We must stop shielding ourselves from the unequal relationship between Serbs and Albanians. There’s no room for false equivalence between the colonizer and colonized. We either wholeheartedly reject it or we end up justifying it in one way or another. 

Confronting Our Contradictions

I, like many people, am highly critical of the U.S. government. Growing up, my parents themselves pointed out the absurdities in U.S. history curricula that whitewash slavery and the colonization of Indigenous peoples.

If we question U.S. historical narratives, why not apply the same scrutiny to Serbia? If we don’t trust our government about domestic corruption, why do we unquestioningly believe its narratives about Kosovo?

My personal journey from blind nationalism to a more nuanced understanding of Kosovo has been both painful and liberating. Confronting the role my ancestors played in the oppression of Albanians and acknowledging the systemic injustices in Serbian history was not an easy process. But it is a necessary one, not only for me but for all Serbs. We need to to build a future with our neighbors, not in spite of them.   

We cannot undo the harm of colonization, but we can choose to reckon with it, to acknowledge the pain caused and to seek a path forward where empathy and responsibility replace denial and hatred. The stories we inherit shape our identities, but it is our responsibility to decide which stories we will continue to tell — and which ones we leave behind.

Editor’s note: The author of this piece requested to only use their initials due to fear of retribution and targeting by official Serbian authorities, as well as ethno-nationalists who support Serbian colonialism and oppression in Kosovo.

Feature image: Atdhe Mulla.

Want to support our journalism? Become a member of HIVE or consider making a donation. Learn more here.