While talking to my students, together we saw it fit and we decided to open our school [Xhevdet Doda], but it was characteristic how we would open the school on both sides, on both wings {shows with her fingers} of the school there were two tanks. While discussing it we were deciding that if we open the school door, the main entrance, they would see us, stop us and we wouldn’t achieve anything with that, and then the violence, repression against us.
And I said, ‘You know what? We are allowed to open the school elsewhere,’ because I knew it well, I worked for a long time. I said, ‘Since this is an old building and it has some window bars, but it’s possible that those bars, maybe you can do it together and we can remove those bars and get in through…’ it was the window in the basement, of the bathrooms {describes with her hand} of the basement. And we went there with those 17 students and we decided to open it.
[…] They did not stop us, nor did others come to stop us from opening it. And we stayed in that school. Of course, they came to school later asking, ‘How did you open it?’ and so on, but not to get us out of there. Maybe it was, how do I say it, a political maneuver so they could say in front of the world, ‘We are letting them, but they don’t want to. There’s this school that works in their school premisses, because we are letting them, we’re not stopping them.’
Ajnishahe Azemi was born in 1955 in the village Loxha. She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Prishtina. After graduation, in 1980, she started working as a professor at Xhevdet Doda Gymnasium in Prishtina, where she worked until her retirement in 2020. Ms. Azemi was a member of the Democratic League of Kosovo and the Women’s Forum since its founding. She was an advisor to the Municipal Assembly of Prishtina from 2002 to 2017. Ms. Azemi is also a humanitarian activist. She lives with her family in Prishtina.