On the way to the Rambouillet Peace Conference: […] They had never given me a passport since I got out of prison. Then, in a way, they were forced to, since I was a member of the delegation, they issued me a passport. With that brand-new passport, I was traveling freely for the first time that day. […] The members of the KLA in the delegation came to the airport but didn’t go through the usual checkpoint where passports are inspected, they went straight onto the plane. They arrived in KDOM vehicles, as they were called at the time, the observers. They boarded the plane without any checks at all. Even so, they didn’t fully trust that things would go so smoothly. Each of them had taken a pistol along. Not to kill anyone with it, but they were convinced they must not surrender and would use it on themselves if it came to that. […] On the plane I said to the Commander of the General Staff, Azem Syla was in that position at the time, we had been organized together in the movement and later we were in prison together for a while. […] Jokingly, I said, ‘When Isa Boletini went to Europe, he didn’t go unarmed like you, like this,’ I told him. And he opened his coat like this and showed me that he had one.
Mehmet Hajrizi was born in 1948 in Strofc, Vushtrri. He completed the Normale School and graduated in Albanian Language and Literature from the University of Prishtina. In 1973, he co-founded the Revolutionary Group of Kosovo, an underground organization advocating for Kosovo’s republican status, and was later arrested and spent 9 nine years in prison. In 1999, he was a member of the Kosovo delegation to the Rambouillet Peace Conference. In the 1990s, he led the Central Council for the Financing of Kosovo and in the postwar period he occupied several positions as a civil servant and government advisor. He retired in 2013.