Aela Bektashi: Hello Professor, thank you again for agreeing to do this interview with us. It is truly a great honor for us that you accepted, and we are very happy that we are able to do this interview. As we explained, our project is about the help the mountains gave to Albanians during the last war, but within that, we also want to know about you, about your life, how you grew up, how you spent your youth, up until today, your academic work, your job, and all of that. Once again, we want to say how grateful we are that you agreed to do this interview. You can start whenever you wish.
Nexhat Cocaj: I should be the one thanking you, thank you for your interest. Like every Albanian in the 1980s, we young people went through a difficult time. I was fortunate, or unfortunate, to be part of the demonstrations of 1981, 1982, and 1983. My participation in those demonstrations had negative consequences when it came to military service in Yugoslavia, and once I went to serve in the Yugoslav army, I faced issues with the security services during that period.
I was unlucky to fall ill, specifically, I lost my eyesight and was blind for two years. After medical interventions, I was able to return to life, essentially, but I was left with the consequences of that illness. After that, I began my studies. I first completed the Faculty of Philosophy, which at the time included Philology, in the Albanian Language and Literature department. I also completed my postgraduate studies, what is now called a Master’s, and then my PhD in the field of Ethnology and Folklore at the Institute of Anthropology in Tirana.
Before earning my doctorate, I began writing literature. The first novel I wrote is Kloni (The Fence), which is a novel about the Pashtrik mountain, specifically about the closure of the border in 1948, when the ethnographic unit of the Has region was split in half between two states. Not only were the people divided between two countries, but even some villages were split in half, with some neighborhoods left in Albania and others in Kosovo. What led me to this subject was that I had started working as a journalist for the student newspaper. In 1986, I conducted interviews with people who used to move through the mountains to maintain their family ties. I did around 300 interviews with people who were separated from their families by the border, essentially by the mountain. I managed to speak with children who were separated from their parents by the mountain, and, for example, with couples where the husband or wife was left on the other side. That’s the main theme and motivation behind Kloni, a novel I dedicated to the mountain.
But it has nothing to do with cloning, with cloning as a scientific phenomenon, but rather with kloni as the term used for the electrified border line, those who crossed the border, in other words, came upon electrified wires and died on the spot. This has nothing to do with the biological or scientific meaning of cloning or the creation of an identical species, but refers to what was called kloni at the time, the border, the electrified line that separated people from each other. And as a journalist, my interest at that time was in the mountain, and my inspiration came from the mountain.
At that time, I’m talking about 1948 and 1952, there were movements, or rather dissatisfaction between the two systems, and the theme of the novel is about a mother being separated [from her family], or more specifically, a couple, where the woman was married in Albania but came to visit her parents and left her child over there in Albania and over here she created a new family, got married after eight years.
The main character of this novel was alive until about three or four years ago, when she passed away. What’s interesting is that in 1990, when the border opened, in ‘91 for the first time, the son of the main character came from Albania to Kosovo. His voice was identical to the son born after the [Second World] war. And he said, “Are you tired, mom?” She thought it was the other son talking, unaware that it was actually her first son, and the son didn’t know he was speaking to his mother either. Then he went to the living room, and there he explained who he was, where he was from, and at that moment, the two brothers were talking to each other without knowing they were brothers, born of the same mother, the same blood.
And that’s what the border did, what the mountain did. The particularities of the mountain are what define it. Later, when everything related to the Albanian issue was banned, books, universities, private home teaching began. At that time, I started working as a teacher in the village’s primary school. Then in 1994, I also started working as a teacher at the secondary school.
During this period, I was a post-master’s or doctoral student, or pursuing my master’s, and around that time, in 1991, as a group of intellectuals, we started publishing a newspaper called Etje (Thirst), a regional newspaper. Due to the difficulties and high prices in Kosovo, we had the mountains nearby, Albania nearby, we were in a border region, so, on the advice of the Etje editorial board, we decided to publish the newspaper in Albania.
But in Albania, we published… through the mountains… together with my colleague, who is also now a doctor of literature, Besim Madri – back when neither of us had our doctorates – when we were just master’s students, what’s important is that we would go to Albania through the mountains and bring back literature for our other colleagues as well, because it was easier at that time for us to cross the Pashtrik mountain, despite the border, despite the mountain itself. We published the newspaper in the middle of Tirana and carried it on our backs through the Pashtrik mountains, then distributed it in Kosovo.
It’s very interesting that during the time we were publishing the newspaper in Albania, it was an enormous effort, a tremendous burden not only to publish the paper but also to buy literature. In that same period, I forgot to mention this earlier, in 1990 I was part of the Reconciliation of Blood Feuds Council and involved in organizing the blood feuds reconciliation initiative. In fact, just the other day, on May 2, we had the anniversary of the reconciliation campaign, in which I was part of the Council, mainly the head of the Reconciliation Council for the Has region. I was fortunate to also personally know Professor Anton Çetta, as I lived with Jak Mika, the head of the “Mother Teresa” association, and we had a connection. We also established our own council within the larger council for the reconciliation of blood feuds.
During this time, we started establishing contacts through the mountain, we initiated contact with Radio Kukës. Back then, I did interviews with Anton Çetta, Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, Rexhep Ismaili, Sabri Hamiti, Muhamet Shukriu, and several other intellectuals of the time. I would send the interviews to Kukës on cassette tapes, and Radio Kukës would broadcast them as interviews with intellectuals of the time. All the interviews I conducted in Kosovo were carried by cassette to Albania, where they were published, and the voice of the interviewer was altered to prevent identifying who conducted the interviews.
Between 1991 and 1999, if we count both entries and exits, because crossing the border goes both ways, we broke the border around 300 times, or more precisely 304 crossings. We continued to carry the newspaper. For instance, in 1993, there was a moment when the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) first began to emerge publicly. At that time, the only route, the only means of movement for the cause, was the mountain. This wasn’t just for soldiers who were not yet in uniform but also for those who had duties to continue and communicate with the outside world.
The communication between three intellectuals, to be precise the three main patriots, happened via the mountain, and from Durrës, we were sent 18 people who had arrived from Switzerland and wanted to establish contact with the leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army. From Durrës, we guided them through the mountains, because by then we had made the Pashtrik mountain route our main path, like a highway today, and we used it to cross and move people across the border. To be completely honest, in the name of truth, I didn’t know who those people were. I only learned after the war that they had been members of the Kosovo Army or among the first initiators of the KLA during that period. At the time, we didn’t know who they were or what exactly they were doing. Later, as the KLA movement grew at the start of the war, one of the requirements, one of the necessities, for launching the war was transporting weapons. In the beginning, weapons were transported through the mountains, but not all of us knew this at the time.
In the beginning, it was an activity that needed to be organized to make something visible to the population, to let the people know that there would be movement of people. We started by organizing a student knowledge quiz. Through it, we held competitions with students from different schools in the Has region, because that entire area lies along the border line between Albania and Kosovo, which is essentially the division of a nation, the division of a land, the division of a region by an absurd border.
In this context, by organizing and holding meetings with the students, we would also tell them that there would be movement of people and that they shouldn’t be surprised or confused, and so on. I also remember, during the activities of the Reconciliation of Blood Feuds Council with Professor Ukshin Hoti when we were in Kushnin, because Professor Ukshin Hoti, in addition to his work on reconciliation in the region of Anadrinia and other parts of Kosovo, was also a member of the Kosovo-wide Reconciliation Council, when we went to Kushnin, he addressed us students at the time, pointing toward Pashtrik mountain: “The reconciliation of blood feuds will happen, because we must not guard our backs from each another, we must be free, and we must move forward. The mission of reconciliation is to eliminate hostility among ourselves, because we never know when and how we may have to travel.” And that’s exactly what happened, the reconciliation of blood feuds paved the way for the KLA’s movement and the beginning of free movement.
In 1997, the movement of soldiers increased significantly, they would come on horseback and bring the weapons to a specific location, after which trucks, buses, or other vehicles would come to pick them up. In this context, being part of these movements, especially after the death of the legendary commander Adem Jashari, a unit was formed in the Has region on March 26, 1998. It was called the 1000 Unit, and it organized local groups of ten in every village, with the goal of being prepared to receive incoming soldiers from different areas.
Naturally, above all, a guide familiar with the border and the terrain was necessary, because it wasn’t possible to lead a platoon or large number of soldiers going to retrieve weapons if no one knew the area. It made no sense for [people] from Mitrovica, Ferizaj, Prishtina, Budakova, or other zones where units had formed, to arrive without someone who knew the border route. So, certain people were responsible for escorting the soldiers carrying weapons. Horses also played a vital role in this process. A large portion of the weapons were transported by horse. But why horses? What made them so important?
During my time in the KLA, first with the 1000 unit, and later with Brigade 126, I had heard, though I hadn’t experienced it myself at first, that horses are highly sensitive and instinctively avoid stepping on mines, as they can detect danger and the scent of gunpowder. They can sense threats from a distance. In the entire history of transporting weapons, there was never a case where a horse-led group fell into an ambush, because the horses sensed it in advance. When a horse stopped, that was an order, a law, for the soldiers to stop too, because the horse had detected danger and would not proceed.
There were also instances, since weapons were transported across different seasons, where weather in the mountains, like dense fog, created extreme visibility issues. In those cases, the [KLA] soldiers would literally follow the horse’s tail. The horse knew the route and never forgot it, as it sees ten times better than a human and remembers the paths. Many times, horses proved to be the best guides through the mountain trails. If a horse took a path once, it would never forget it, making the horse, essentially, a leader and strategist for weapon transportation.
Something else left a strong impression on me [is a story I heard from] the late Avdi Cahani, in whose house the KLA headquarters was located in Sahan, Albania, which lies at the foot of Pashtrik, on the other side of the mountain. The KLA headquarters was based there, and later that same location served as the command center for Operation “Arrow.” A tragic incident happened with the soldiers, and Avdi Cahani personally told me how a horse can detect whether a soldier is dead or alive. Because a horse will not walk with a corpse, but if the soldier is in a coma, and there were cases of soldiers falling into a coma due to gunfire, trauma, or other factors [the horse will still walk with them], it was something I heard for the first time from Avdi Cahani…
As I mentioned, he was from Sahan and passed away about two years ago. He explained how a horse could sense if someone had died or not, because on top of the mountain, there’s no way to get a doctor, no way to know for sure. Up there, you can’t determine death through pulse without medical equipment. In those moments, the horse served, in quotation marks, as a kind of “folk doctor” who could detect death. That’s how I was inspired, through the experience on Pashtrik mountain, to develop the idea of conducting a study on the horse in the Albanian tradition and to specifically examine the role of the horse in the KLA and its contribution.
During this period, from Peja to Struga, the entire border zone was engaged in war, and around 3,000 horses were used to transport weapons. And surprisingly, unbelievably, not a single one of them stepped on a mine. All other animals, cows, sheep, and even people did, but not a single horse did, because they sensed the danger. I wasn’t present myself, but I have recorded testimonies, with names, of [KLA] soldiers describing how a horse once sensed a landmine in the ground and held its leg on the ground for hours and it did not step on the mine, I mean, the horse never triggered the mine.
There were cases where horses were shot while crossing the border, Serbian forces spared neither people nor animals carrying weapons, but I haven’t found a single case of a horse stepping on a mine, from the mountains of Struga to Prenjas in Albania. Weapons were carried across the mountains, because the entire KLA war effort was conducted through the mountains, and supply lines relied on them. Movement through the mountains, or the mountains themselves, I can say, were the backbone of the army. Like today’s military training grounds, for the KLA, the mountain was the barracks.
And the bedding was on the oak leaves or the soil, while the sky was the KLA’s roof. Everywhere in the mountains, their importance in the KLA war and the mountain’s contribution to it remains significant. Later, during the various offensives of Operation “Arrow,” there were many cases when Yugoslav artillery shells were fired, and I say Yugoslav, because the Serbian army at the time included Montenegrin forces. Often, we tend to remove Montenegro from responsibility, but at that time Serbia and Montenegro had a joint army.
Then, we can say that in the Peja region and the Gjakova region, it was the Montenegrin army forces that committed grave crimes against the Albanian population. During the war period, when our very existence was at risk, and I must emphasize this, the General Staff of the KLA had issued an order that the border zones should not be endangered by the presence of uniformed soldiers. These areas had to remain “free zones” for weapon supply routes and should not give Serbian forces the impression that KLA troops were stationed there. Therefore, all the activity of [KLA] soldiers in the border area was carried out without uniforms, with the purpose of continuing our work as KLA soldiers without provoking enemy interference.
From 1993 until May 1999, there were 49 functioning supply channels for transporting weapons in the Pashtrik area alone, not to mention the mountains on the Opoja side above Brezne, between Beznë and Buqe, or the mountains from Deçan. But I can speak in more detail about Pashtrik, where these 49 supply channels operated almost without interruption, even in the most difficult days of the war, the weapons continued to be transported through the mountains.
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Aldri Sopa: So, professor, could you tell us about your experience in one of these weapon-transport missions?
Nexhat Cocaj: First of all, as I mentioned, the regional headquarters in Niš was responsible for securing the border and monitoring the movements of Serbian soldiers heading there.
At the time, I was working as a teacher at the Gjon Buzuku gymnasium, and I had also engaged some of my high school students to act as lookouts. Since I lived right next to the road used by the Serbian army, I would assign the students the task of counting how many soldiers were going to the border during the day and, in the evening, counting how many returned. In this way, we knew exactly every day, and we reported to the regional headquarters of the 1000 Unit how many soldiers had gone to the border point in Guruzhup and how many had come back. This way, we knew precisely how many Serbian soldiers were stationed at the border point on Pashtrik mountain, specifically in the Guruzhup area. These reports were kept by the regional headquarters, and then we would notify all the groups traveling to transport weapons.
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Nexhat Cocaj: In this way, all the groups that set out to transport weapons had information on how many Serbian soldiers were stationed at the border. This helped us enormously, and I can say that the high school students gave a significant contribution in this way, many of them later went from high school straight into becoming KLA soldiers. We would send these reports in writing to the regional headquarters of the 1000 unit, and from there, the regional headquarters maintained connections with the other headquarters through the commander of the 1000 Unit.
The meetings were mostly held in villages, mainly in valleys, often in the mountains. I remember, for example, during this period of weapons transportation, in June 1998, if I’m not mistaken, when trucks would arrive to be loaded with [KLA] soldiers who brought weapons as far as Gurë, in Demjan, there was a car that would follow us every time. We suspected it might be someone intending to report us and disrupt the plan for transporting weapons, because in the Has region, thanks to the people and their generosity, not a single soldier ever fell into an ambush.
Even though in December 1998 there was an armed confrontation with the Yugoslav army at the top of Pashtrik, where several KLA martyrs fell, there was never any betrayal in the Pashtrik mountains by activists, the population, or anyone else. And that car following us caught our attention, we needed to monitor it, and the 1000 Unit headquarters tasked me with finding out who it belonged to. How did I discover whose car it was?
I deliberately punctured my car tire in front of that car and then asked them for help to fix it. That way, I found out whose car it was, and from there we identified the person and took the necessary measures to ensure they no longer acted suspiciously.
Over time, during the arming and supply operations, we also lost [KLA] soldiers. On June 8, 1998, we lost the martyr Haxhi Hoti, about whom I later wrote a book. Interestingly, he was with the first horse to be killed in the war by gunfire — both the soldier, now referred to as Commander Haxhi Hoti, and the horse were killed. The horse had stopped and refused to move, having sensed danger.
Another important mountain-related event involves a woman from Gjakova who crossed through Qafa e Prushit, or through the mountain route, crossing the border. She gave birth along the way, and out of fear that the army would take her baby, she continued the journey. The baby’s umbilical cord was cut with a stone on the road, and she placed the newborn in a sack until they crossed the border.
I know this because I interviewed the woman. At that time, I was running the information office in the premises of the Kruma mosque, as part of the KLA headquarters. Another interview that left an impression on me was with someone who came to that office, because all those who had experienced rape by Serbian soldiers or police, or family members who wanted to reunite with their relatives, would come to report there, and we, as members of the KLA, would assist the population in reuniting with their families.
One case I can mention in this regard is that of Sadije Morina from Raushiq, Peja, whose child had died, but she didn’t want to leave the body, even in death, to the police. At the same time, she didn’t want her own family to find out the child had died, so she kept the child’s body with her for 24 hours before reaching Durrës, feeding it with a bottle. The bottle had frozen to the child’s mouth, because when a person dies, the muscles stiffen, and the bottle had stuck there. What’s particularly striking is that when she crossed the border, the bottle was still full of milk, and the mouth of the dead child remained closed. At Qafa e Prushit, where the Albanian military forces were stationed to help those crossing through the mountains, another woman approached her and asked, “Could I have that milk to feed my baby?” She replied, “No, I can’t, because my child has died and I can’t remove the bottle.”
From this interview, which I conducted myself, I later wrote a short story titled Qumështi i Vdekjes (The Milk of Death), telling the story of these displaced people and their movements. Another major contribution we, as the headquarters and later Brigade 126, provided was assistance to the displaced in contacting their families and accessing other necessary information. What left an impression on me, as the deputy head of information at the time, was that I would give news reports through Radio Deutsche Welle (DW), Voice of America, Radio Kukës, Radio Tirana, and the BBC, among others, and I never, not once, gave a single report saying that a KLA soldier had been killed. Commander Xheladin Gashi, with the pseudonym Plaku (The Elder), told me I had to be very careful when giving information, because the public should not hear that our soldiers were being killed at the front lines, in Pashtrik.
There was one case when Safet Peci from Boletin was killed, I gave the news for Radio DW saying that he had suffered minor injuries and, after receiving first aid, had returned to the operation. In reality, we had just finished burying him. His family heard the news on Radio DW that their son had been lightly wounded and returned to battle, and just ten minutes later they received the official report from the KLA General Staff that he had fallen in combat. When they later came to meet me in Kruma, they thanked me for the way I had communicated the news, as I had not wanted to break morale.
On the contrary, in the radio broadcasts I often gave during the various operations, I would say that our soldiers had penetrated deep into Kosovo territory during Operation “Arrow,” even though I knew the soldiers had not yet… And I never disclosed the exact location of the soldiers, instead, I would say they were several kilometers toward Kosovo. At the time, just as we could intercept the radio signals of the Serbian army and police, they could also intercept ours, so we never gave precise information about battles or troop positions.
It was our duty not only to choose our words carefully, but also to choose the manner of delivering information, how to convey it, since I was working as a journalist. Many moments from the various operations, from weapon transport, from supplying arms, were significant in showing the contribution of the mountains to the war effort and the role the population played alongside them. I remember that after the war ended, when we were recovering bodies, we in Brigade 126, the Has Brigade, issued a statement to the public, asking them not to bury relatives they found dead in their homes or elsewhere without notifying the General Staff, specifically Brigade 126, so that we could photograph them first.
As a journalist, I took around 800 photographs of the massacres committed during the war, including the retrieval of bodies. I remember one case in Lubishtë, Has, where people had been buried with only stones piled over them. Rocks had simply been thrown over the corpses, with feet sticking out, parts of the bodies eaten by animals, and so on. We had to retrieve those remains, holding tobacco under our noses to mask the smell. This was our only option at the time, because we didn’t have mortuary equipment after the war; in the first days after liberation, it was difficult to find and collect the bodies in order to bury them as they deserved. We recovered bodies from caves, valleys, and other places where they had been left.
We received information from citizens who had managed to survive. I also photographed a case on the White Drin river, a young woman, about 20 years old, whose body had been mutilated with a knife all over, especially on her chest and in her genitals, and then shot in the forehead. This photograph still circulates today, I took it myself when I found her in the White Drin river. I later organized a postwar photo exhibition showing such images, opening it in Gjilan, Gjakova, Pristina, Prizren, Tirana, and Kukës. One moment that stands out for me, connected to the mountain, happened on the day the Yugoslav, or rather Serbian, forces began withdrawing from the border post. Together with the OSCE [Organization for the Security and Cooperation in Europe] representative from Slovenia, someone I had already been in contact with during the OSCE mission in Kosovo, I witnessed this. The KLA, particularly our headquarters, cooperated extensively with international organizations, including the OSCE. At that time, in Kruma, we had no satellite phones and no way to connect directly with people.
As KLA members, we also helped civilians through the OSCE and other contacts. We encountered cases like that of children separated from their mothers at the border crossing. There was one three-month-old baby separated because the mother could not carry the child along the route and gave it to someone else. When it was her turn to cross with her other children, the baby she had been nursing had already crossed earlier with the first group, leaving them separated. This was the case of Leonita Haziraj, and through the OSCE, we located her family and reunited them three weeks later. For us, the mountain was both a refuge and a battlefield, the place where we carried out our activities during the KLA war.
In this way, I, as a KLA member, contributed both as a journalist and as head of the information office within Brigade 126. I was involved in communication and in the various activities carried out, weapon transports, supply missions, visits to the front, gathering information, and taking statements. At the start of Operation “Arrow,” media outlets were not allowed to go up there to avoid leaking secrets. It must be said, and acknowledged, that at that time there were also individuals who, out of fear, from hearing gunfire or seeing [KLA] soldiers die, became frightened and left. Because of this, the General Staff ordered that journalists were not allowed to move in battle zones, so the information came through our headquarters, and we would release it in our reports.
As I said, never, never have we mentioned a case where a soldier was killed. On the contrary, we held burial ceremonies, and for all the burials we carried out, since I was also a member of the soldiers’ burial council, we would place the name of the fallen soldier inside a glass bottle, so that we could find them someday. We hoped that when we returned to Kosovo, we could locate them by name, so it would be known which soldier was where. None of us knew whether we would return alive or return at all. Every member of the KLA who set out on a task, whatever it was, was in danger and never knew if they would survive. We always took measures as if we would not make it, leaving the opportunity for someone else to be able to communicate and have documentation. As I said, I also took photographs, kept a personal diary, and kept the documents I had in the KLA’s information office.
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Nexhat Cocaj: Transporting weapons is a separate story, as I briefly mentioned. Since I was in the gymnasium and lived right at the center of the road [along the route they took to transport weapons, so I could closely follow what was happening]… Weapons transport was done from Albania, with horses in the first village, then tractors or trucks. I remember some trips that the soldiers made, one of them was the national martyr Asllan Berisha, who had gone to Planej. They loaded the tractor with weapons, and on top of the weapons they placed some logs, pretending they were transporting wood. At that time, we gave the signal, Nexhmedin Berisha was there too, that at the police checkpoint there were no police officers, and we would make sure of that through students. We sent the students to the police checkpoints to check, and we wouldn’t make a move until we were sure, because we didn’t want the [KLA] soldiers transporting weapons to fall into a police ambush. This was pretty much how every movement was done.
Another matter that should be mentioned is the issue of supplying medicine. At the time, I was responsible for information, and we asked the Nëna Terezë clinic to provide us with medicine. But the doctor back then didn’t dare, or was afraid someone might see her, so she would leave the clinic door open. We would go in, take the medicine package, and bring it up to the mountains to station it there. We set up points in the mountains where soldiers passed through. We had plastic dressing already opened, and intravenous needles needed for urgent interventions. In this way, we had several medical points, and this was our personal contribution, mine in particular.
We had one in a house in Muader, and after that house burned down, we were forced to take them up into the mountains. We had one in Kushnik, one in Lubishte, and basically everywhere [KLA] soldiers passed through, there was a mini-ambulance in the mountains. We had them hidden in rocks, cliffs, and certain spots that only unit members knew. If injured soldiers came, whether from gunshot wounds or injuries along the way, they were given first aid through these points. For this, I must thank the Motrat Qiriazi association; Igballe Rugova was the one who several times brought us medicine from Pristina, and we used them throughout Pashtrik. We also took medicine from a pharmacy in Prizren and carried it to the mountains.
As I said, the contribution was collective, and the mountain essentially served as both an ambulance and a hospital. During the KLA war, specifically during Operation “Arrow,” I wasn’t part of what I’m about to say now. There were hospitals set up inside caves, while the main hospital was in Kruma, where the mosque of Kruma had been turned into a hospital. But getting from the front line to the hospital took about an hour to an hour and a half because it was difficult to reach. So they stayed in caves, and there were both our Albanian doctors and wartime doctors from various countries around the world who contributed. The mountain served as a hospital, as an ambulance, and as a place for first aid, and everyone contributed as much as they could, in whatever way they could.
