I spent four years of my life in Kosovo,  I travelled all over Kosovo, off-roaded all over Kosovo. I used to know Kosovo like the back of my hand, okay? It’s a beautiful country. I went all over, and the nice thing about it was that I felt more at ease and at home in Kosovo than I did in the other former Yugoslav countries because Kosovo Albanians had a lot of the same culture that I grew up with, yeah? […] [What happened in the war] was really sad because here’s the problem: in Kosovo, you had Christians and Muslims, okay? So, it wasn’t about religion, it was about ethnic cleansing.

We were in Podujeva. The schools were closed. […] Bajram and I went to visit them. The atmosphere was extremely heavy, the anxiety very great. I told them, the secondary schools were in question, I said, ‘Don’t worry, classes will continue in Albanian.’ That’s where the idea was born. Because at that time, I worked in the office of the Pedagogical Institute, where the Veterans’ Association is now, that’s where we had our offices. I worked until midnight, thinking what to do, how to do it. […] I knew there were around 10,000 police officers in Kosovo. I also knew that we had about 12,000 classes. There was no way to stop education when people wanted to be educated. Under those conditions, in the meadow, in the meadow; in the field, in the field; in the house, in the house.

Serbian students fought with Albanian students in Runik…They sent Vahide Hoxha, Fadil Hoxha’s wife, to take care of the incident…That woman was a lady, an incomparable woman. A woman like [Madeleine] Albright… There were communists there who, when something like that happened, liked to act holier than the Pope, acting like they cared so much about Serbs…We were stuck there for almost half the night. Then I spoke. I said, ‘What happened here often happens even among Albanians; they fight. It didn’t happen with any kind of agenda. It didn’t happen because they were Serbs and we were Albanians… We can try to give it whatever meaning we want, but it has no political color, no ethnic hatred, nothing.’ The meeting ended…There was still a café open, we went in for coffee and talked with Vahide. Vahide said, ‘You got us out of a crisis. Morning would’ve caught us there if you hadn’t spoken’… Avdyl Miftari, the history teacher, said, ‘Comrade Vahide, Xhafer wants to stay here all night because he has nowhere else to go, no apartment, no nothing.’ She looked at me and said, ‘You don’t have an apartment?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ She said, ‘You’ll have one.’

[The Trepça technical school] started the school year ‘94–‘95 in a private house in the Bajr neighborhood, and that’s when the police intervened…It was the 15th of December. It was a cold day, a day with thick fog, very thick fog. While coming to school, the students noticed the police circling around. That house had a yard surrounded by a wall, we came out and closed the gate… But they climbed the wall, entered the yard, and went straight into the classrooms… I remember that they mistreated me in front of the students…Whatever they found on the desks, they threw into the stove, those were iron stoves, and they burned it. They made the students write their symbols on the board. And then, at some point, they let them go. I was savagely mistreated in the hallway… They destroyed the classrooms, they even knocked over the stoves, stoves that were still lit. Before they let me go, they made me grab the lit stoves, I am telling the truth, until my hands were burned.

At that time, the information office was in the premises of the mosque in Kruma, within the headquarters of the KLA. All those individuals who had either experienced rape by Serbian soldiers and police, or those family members who wanted to reunite with their families, came and presented themselves there, and we, as members of the KLA, helped the population to reunite. One case of particular interest in this regard was when Sadije Morina from Raushiq of Peja, whose child had died, didn’t want to leave it, even dead, to the police. On the other hand, she didn’t want her own family to find out that the child had died, and she kept the dead child for 24 hours, before reaching Durrës, giving him the bottle, and the bottle froze in his mouth, because when a person dies, they stiffen, and the bottle froze…When she crossed the border, the bottle, with the milk inside, was in the closed mouth of the dead child, and another woman approached [Sadije] at Qafa e Prushit, where the Albanian military forces, who were helping those crossing through the mountains, were located, and she said, “Is it possible for you to give me that milk so I can give it to my baby?” She replied, “No, it’s not possible because my child has died and I cannot take out the bottle.” I wrote the novella The Milk of Death based on this interviewed.

It’s interesting, to be honest, when both teachers and students were mistreated and [the police] would actually leave, we used to think that the next day, not a single student would show up. But, strangely enough, by the grace of God, everyone was there, no absences. The teachers, the students… of course, I can speak for myself, but also for others, it was enough just to know they were there. And they were close to us, meaning they were by our side. Then we’d calm down and continue the lessons.

 

[…] I mean, all the students were at school. The bell rang, it was time. Strangely, at the exact minute the bell rang, within three minutes, the entire school was surrounded. Luckily, we tried to stay calm and watched from the windows how they were acting and what was awaiting us, obviously. First, they took us to the third floor, or the second, I’m not sure, but the main thing is they formed two police cordons. Fortunately, the students weren’t mistreated. And among the 30 or 40 of us teachers, it was Professor Muharrem Peci who suffered the worst, he had very serious injuries.

We had a front-line house in Lower Klina because we couldn’t use the high school in Skenderaj, since it was the main center here. I later went around schools as an advisor, since those were established a bit later. We held competitions, we organized quizzes, and we even won first place in the region. So, normal activities, even though at the end of such events, they would take us to the station, sometimes beat us, mistreat us, but they couldn’t stop us entirely.