These years from 2020 to 2025,  the beginning of 2025, have been the most beautiful years of my life. My husband came [to Skri Lanka] too, I went back often, and the children came as well. It’s a very beautiful culture. Modestly speaking, it doesn’t matter where you are, who you are, or who or what you work for. You can find a home anywhere in the world, and everywhere, you find people.  Even when I was sick with dengue fever, I was surrounded by people who cared for me. I wasn’t alone. Mehmet even said, ‘I’ll come,’ but I told him, ‘You don’t need to, I have people here taking care of me, there’s no need.’ That’s how you find a home, you find love, you find kindness everywhere. The world is one sky; the world belongs to everyone. Why should I confine myself only to my house, my country, my family? It belongs to all of us. We are just in one part of the world. So now my daughters, one is in Berlin, one is in Lisbon. I’m not upset that they’ve gone, and we don’t say, ‘Why don’t you stay here with us?’ It doesn’t matter, wherever you go, you contribute…Wherever they have it better, wherever they see more, wherever they contribute, they are also contributing to their own country. And this is no longer the classic form of migration; now it’s simply globalization, home and country exist everywhere.

For example, we would finish quickly, we’d just take the key information. That was also the advantage when I worked sometimes with the BBC and sometimes with other television crews. I didn’t like television at all, because it was very performative. For instance, on TV it was very important to see the fire, to capture it like that, the image was what mattered most. With investigative journalists, we would stay a bit longer, spend more time researching, but even then it was still this kind of ‘tell us’ […] and we were there asking people to tell us about the worst day of their lives, to tell us the most traumatic event they had experienced—and then we would say, ‘thank you very much, have a good day’…

Ajshe Kastrati Hadri: “We went together to enroll at the university. I went with her and said, ‘I want to see that you really enroll.’ So I see a lady, older than me, looking at the board. She saw her name, that she had passed, and she started jumping and shouting. I said, ‘Teuta, what is this lady doing, has she passed her year, her exam?’ And I said, ‘Well then, I’m coming too, I’m going to enroll as well.’  You see, I really like studying. I got married at 18, then I had children, responsibilities, I came here, I didn’t know the language well. Now people come and they go to information centers, they learn the language and all that; I had to work, and I stayed like this. Otherwise, with pleasure, I would have gone to university. I liked studying, yes, yes.”

 

Teuta Hadri: “As for the trial itself, I decided to spare my brothers and my sister this heavy burden. I told myself, ‘This is my moment. I’m the one who will handle this.’ I was determined to say, ‘I will only speak with my lawyer. I won’t let any information slip, not to my brother, not to my mother, not to anyone. I’ll keep this completely under my control until the very end.’ That was the first thing. The second thing was that I also wanted to reclaim this part of history, which will forever be part of my father’s story. Because obviously there were others who tried to appropriate it, political appropriation, or simply claiming the story by saying, ‘We were by his side. We were there. We did this, we did that.’ …For me, the trial was a way of mastering something in the present, because I couldn’t control what my father was doing when I was little. Even now I still struggle to explain it.”

Two or three teachers were killed in the first school that was opened. I remember we went there with Fehmi Agani. It was somewhere in Dukagjin, I don’t remember which village, where they made a house available and immediately they killed them – the owner and two or three others, the teachers…Surely the names are somewhere. But I know that the first killings happened immediately. Because they tried to stop the momentum. They had no possibility to stop parallel education…There was an initiative and we once even held discussions in the faculties to try to return to the university. I remember that we went [to a meeting] in Mitrovica. It was that former leadership, together with Minir Dushi, I think, or I don’t know who it was, but without success. We knew that it was only a formality, just so it couldn’t be said that we hadn’t held talks.

[Shkolla Normale, November 30, 1968]. When Xhavit Nimani took the floor… it was already very late, almost 8 in the evening…I got angry and spoke arrogantly, I said, ‘Enough, do not tire us.’ …For this day, for this speech, I had prepared myself. I had memorized some things by heart. Ali Boletini taught them to me, as did Hamëz Shala and Halil Alidema. They made me repeat the words. ‘Ask for the flag. Because the partisans fought in the anti fascist war with this flag, ask for it. Ask for the development of the country. Ask why Trepça is being exploited.’ …And Ali never spoke loudly, he said, ‘Do not be like Halil who bangs on the table, you do not bang on the table. If you are there, you must present the demands.’.. Point by point, like reciting a poem, I mentioned all of those things… After I finished with my final sentence, I said, ‘Comrade Xhavit, it is useless to keep us. Until those in prison are released we have no intention to end the strike, the boycott of lessons.’ …On December 4,  they were released. That was our victory. But the possibility to speak, to say things, to demand, was greater…an inspiration that it was indeed possible to make even political figures like Xhavit Nimani back down.

I was lucky: I had done my specialization together with Angela Merkel’s husband at the Moscow University. […] Some of the professors who taught us there, English-speaking, American professors, had taught me earlier in Zagreb. I distinguished myself very much. Believe me, when I went to see Merkel after I became Minister of Albanian-language schools [for the Government in Exile], the Serbian state seal was still dominating. I took the seal of the Republic of Kosovo and told them… As soon as he saw the request with my name, her husband asked, ‘Were you at Moscow University?’ The government’s secretary came running, together with Merkel’s staff, and said, ‘ Merkel will receive you at this hour.’ Ilaz said, ‘So fast? Not even two hours have passed.’ I said, ‘He recognized me as a professor.’ I hadn’t even reached Merkel yet when her first question was, ‘Were you at Moscow University?’ I said yes. ‘You were there with my husband.’ I told her, ‘You know, there are many Albanians here. We’ve opened Albanian-language school courses in Germany. I see that the Serbian Republic’s seal still dominates. We have the seal of the Republic of Kosovo. We are a republic now.’ She said, ‘No problem.’ A few days later, half of my teachers and students came to me saying, ‘Minister, Professor, look, the stamp has arrived: Republic of Kosovo.’

Live, work and be fair and honest, honesty wins over everything. Earn the money with your sweat, not with lies. If someone hires you, go, take your pay, but do your work fairly, so they can come another time and hire you again. I have the case of a former secretary at the Utility Company, now she lives in Niš. Every year she would call me to go and mow her lawn in Prilužje. Aren’t there others that can do it? Yes. But she saw an honest person in me and she would only hire me. Price was never an issue. When she would ask me, ‘How much?’ I would tell her, ‘As much as you want to give me.’

In the seventh grade, after the expulsion of Albanians to Turkey began…I had a deskmate, Nazmije, I don’t remember her last name. When the letter came that she absolutely had to go to Turkey,  it was an extremely heavy event which left such an impression that I will never forget it. Every time I remember it, somehow I get very emotional. All the people of Mitrovica would go out to the train station. It was the Belgrade–Skopje train. Because there had also been an agreement with Skopje, that they should go to Skopje where they were given some kind of papers, permits called vesika. Then Turkey accepted them and… that atmosphere was so heavy, that all the people cried. Those who were leaving cried, their relatives cried, the people cried. No one knew what kind of fate was awaiting them…That experience with that classmate was very hard… We went to the train to see them off, the crying and screaming went on. It was very sad. I don’t have any nostalgia for Turkey because our people suffered. They never opened schools, they didn’t let them speak the language…