The content of the treatise called for commemoration of the ‘81 demonstration, for it to take place again in ‘82 and it was a call for demonstrations. Based on the content we understood the goal and that sufficed for us to organize an activity with friends, a close circle of friends, three or four people, and we took that treatise upon ourselves, making copies of the treatise. […]
We made copies in a simple way, we worked on it until a day before. We planned to go out on March 10 [1982], me and another friend, we got out to distribute the treatises and we ran into the police. In an attempt to avoid them, to run from the police in a very steep alley of Pristina, I slipped and fell. They got to me, while my friend was waiting not knowing what to do. I told him, “You run!” And he managed to escape, I was caught while distributing the treatises and I was imprisoned.
[…] I remember that we had a considerable amount of copies of the treatise hidden under my clothes at the chest. We would take them out one by one, two by two, like that. […] I know that they were almost finished, so they caught me with only a few copies. I had distributed the others, but it was my fate to be caught in the act. And then there were investigations, prison and other things.
Skender Vardari was born in 1961 in Istanbul, Turkey. He completed vocational technical school in Pristina. In 1982, he was imprisoned for political activity and sentenced to six years of prison. Upon release from prison he worked for the family business. In 1993, Mr. Vardari was deported to Turkey. After the 1999 war, he returned to Kosovo and continued to work in the business sector. Today he lives with his family in Pristina and works as an archivist for the Kosovo Political Prisoners’ Association.