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.

The decision came from Rugova, from the president and from other bodies as well, that it was absolutely necessary to organize a nationwide, popular protest [against the expulsion of Albanians from school]…The Teachers’ Union proposed that I serve as the chairman of the protest, yes…The decision, the proposal of the late great Rugova was that the protest should be held, but that it must not cause bloodshed…We held about three meetings a day so that the protest would be exemplary, one that would make the enemy nervous and keep us disciplined. […] That’s how we held the meetings… Fetah Bylykbashi was the chairman. And quote and quote at the end is Fehmi Rexhepi—Fehmi Rexhepi is a doctor of science. Because we had planned that if Fetah Bylykbashi were arrested during the protest, and first wounded, or second, killed, the protest should not stop, and then this Fehmi would come and continue… It was a miraculous organization.

My family was deported in animal trucks to Albania, and they didn’t know what fate awaited them. They thought they were going to be killed and end up in a mass grave. My mom is a doctor, a medical doctor, and she said, ‘I just took my diploma, our IDs, your birth certificate, and some clothes for you.’ But she hid the diploma, the IDs, and some photos because she had seen films about Auschwitz, the Second World War, and the war in Bosnia. She said, ‘I knew they might try to say we don’t exist, that we have no identity. So I had to prove we existed.’ She took the risk of carrying the documents, even though people were burning IDs and papers near the Albanian border.

There was a group of students from Podujeva who, it was said, had disarmed a police patrol. They were brought to [the prison in] Lipjan… One day, we saw that those students were also being brought out to walk. There was Jetish Rekaliu, who had been a teacher to some of the students who were now walking through the yard. We, from behind the prison bars and windows, started calling out to them by name, giving them moral support. Some of the students smiled back, some might’ve said something, I couldn’t hear it. Then one of the guards, an Albanian, lined [the other guards]  up and said, ‘I’m going to give each of you a stick.’ He handed them each a baton. The teachers’ reaction, especially Jetish [Rekaliu]’s, was furious. He grabbed the prison bars and shouted at the guard: ‘You idiot! You lowlife! How dare you beat children in front of us?’

All of us, Roma, Serbs and Albanians, are doing better now. One had hate for the other  before the war, and also right after the war, but now it’s better. I do go out and spend time with people and I keep looking and I see people do better, Roma, Serbs and Albanians, we all are doing better…Because I think that no one wants another war, to go through that fear and destruction again. No one wants their child to have to go through what they had to go through the war.

There were a lot of those holidays, how to say, we used to celebrate Erdelezi and that for many days, we would go to each other’s house. It was not just to go to eat and drink, but the thing is that we stick with each other… We used to celebrate Vasi, and that as well was celebrated for 2-3 days… My late father would sing the bread, and then we would gather all together, the whole family would, and we had a lot of expenses… My father would sing the bread, and he would sing to everyone that would come, for every male, or kid, from every family, all… And all, because then people used to feel the impact of the singing… And then, let’s say, there were weddings, and then there were diverse festivities.

One morning, all of a sudden, you see four or five Albanians in our yard…they were friends with my father too, but the friendship disappeared, man, because they were in our yard with knives and things like that, trying to look for their things… I’m not saying that things didn’t disappear during the war, but…even though my father and my mom were saying, ‘We didn’t take anything from you guys, please, we’re friends’… what they saw was a trunk with these clothes from a wedding and …they saw that these clothes did not belong to them but to my mom, and I remember the moment when they were taking all the things outside, they were putting them on the ground, they didn’t care, and they left it like that…I will never, ever forget the scene that I saw after they left. I saw my mom sitting there, you know, making sure that everything was settled again, you know, as it was before, it was a nightmare.

The demands were mainly political. ‘Self-determination!’ ‘Free the political prisoners, Adem Demaçi, Rexhep Mala!’ We called all the political prisoners by name, ‘Trepça works, Belgrade prospers!’ ‘Kosovo Republic!’… ‘Constitution, either through peace or war! […] Hydajet spoke, he spoke as a worker, with his hat on, he was wearing simple clothes, he was a worker and we didn’t know him at all. And that day, Teuta… that situation didn’t let you be passive. And I said, ‘Teuta, you climb up, climb up as a woman. Why should only men climb up? Let the women climb up too.’ ‘No, you climb up Remzije.’ I don’t know how it happened. ‘You climb up, you climb up!’  Before I did, my brother wrote those demands, what to say… on someone’s back, I think it was Teuta’s brother. And he gave me those notes and I was wearing a skirt, it wasn’t exactly easy for me, and then Hydajet Hyseni asked me, ‘Do you recognize me?’ […] And I called the slogans and the crowd was even louder because it’s a little different when a woman speaks. I came down and continued rallying until the evening, it was dark,  very dark, it was late. They dispersed us with tear gas, we scattered and didn’t see each other anymore. I lost my shoes and I saw a guy running down the street, I don’t remember what street that was. And he gave me one of his shoes… I kept it until recently. I don’t know whether someone threw it out recently, because I wanted to keep it as a memory, a memory to keep in a museum — that shoe, to tell about where it happened, what they did, what we did at that time.