Part One
Anita Susuri: Mr. Xun, can you give us an introduction and tell us something about your background and your family?
Xun Çetta: Yes, my name is Xun Çetta. I am from the village of Trubuhoc, in what we call the Lugu i Drinit, near Banja e Pejës. I come from a simple peasant family. Our roots are from the village of Isniq. Nowadays they call it Podgur, but we call it Reka, and that’s where we come from. I was born in that village. My ancestors had left Isniq, let’s say around 200 years ago, probably more. As a family, our life was mainly based on farming and livestock, both. As a child, like all village children, I grew up in those conditions, with the small differences among families.
I completed my schooling in the village of Tërstenik, at the primary school Rilindja, which still carries that name today, up to the seventh grade. The seventh and eighth grades I completed closer to home, because another school opened. That school was called Ismail Qemali, I think it still has that name. Then I completed secondary school in what they called the textile school, the School of Fine Arts in Peja. It used to be called Shaban Spahija School of Art, now I think it is called Odise Paskali School of Art. The Art School in Peja used to be Shaban Spahija, now it is Odise Paskali. After secondary school, I thought it would be best to go and complete military service so that it would not become an obstacle later when I returned to continue my studies.
Sometime around 1975, I left to go into the army. I served as a sailor, and being a sailor usually meant a long service, around 18 months. I don’t know exactly by the end, maybe around 1977–1978, that’s when I was released from the army. Right after that… actually, while I was still serving, my brother here was working on arranging things so I could enroll in further studies. Afterwards I enrolled in the Higher School of Physical Education in Pristina. I was part of the last generation of that Higher School. I had only two exams left before graduating, before entering the diploma stage. We had the fortune, or maybe sometimes I say misfortune, because at times I think it was fortune, since the greatest satisfaction even today is that I was part of those events.
Whether fortune or misfortune, in 1981 I was one of the organizers [of the demonstrations], one of those convicted, one of those who suffered imprisonment, and I was wounded in those events as well. That was my fate. Afterwards I was sentenced to 13 years. We went through the investigation here in Pristina for several months. Then they transferred us to Ljubljana. In Ljubljana…if I were to go into detail, there are many things, and often in other interviews I leave the worst parts aside as if they carried no weight. The inspector who mistreated me terribly, brutally, was Asllan Sllamniku. When all the investigations were over, he came and said to me, “Xun, I know what kind of head you have. After everything you’ve gone through, these days you’ll be transferred to serve your sentence in Slovenia. It’s far away, but it’s better there than in the other prisons. Because if you go to the other prisons, I know for sure you won’t return alive to this country, because I know your mind.” Later, when he had to interrogate me again, I would tell him, “You knew my mind, yet you tortured me.” I went to Slovenia and served my sentence until 1989. Towards the end of 1989 I was released, so eight years and some months. As for the family, before I go on…
Anita Susuri: Yes, I wanted to go back a little…
Xun Çetta: I figured you would stop me there. I come from a peasant family. My father, Mustafa Çetta, was one of the youngest members of the NDSH, because his community at that time reacted strongly. You know, often I find elements from that time that we no longer have today, if one is self-critical or truly impartial. I mean, often I find qualities that were better back then… even under communism, there were elements that we do not have today. That does not mean everything was good, only good. They told him, “You must not declare yourself, nor register,” because Mustafa, my father, was young. He was a sworn NDSH member, a good activist, but they said his recruitment as such a young man could compromise them. Still, he ended up in prison and served six months. There are people here in Prishtina who say, “He didn’t give up even a single person,” and he was released…
Anita Susuri: What generation was your father from?
Xun Çetta: My father was born in 1925. And for the years I’m talking about, naturally this was before ’63, ’64, ’65, when the flag was identified. But before those years, in ’44–’45, there was a terrible history. My father was identified as an NDSH member, while still very young. His brother, my uncle, Brahim Çetta, before the war, according to stories, according to oral tradition, as you also have this program on oral histories, everywhere people say, “Brahim killed many Chetnik forces,” supposedly with the help of a German officer, at that time during Nazi-Fascism. Now when you say “with his help,” I know myself that he had that opportunity. How could we have had the power to kill without some kind of support? For a long time people talked about it. You know, some would say it’s not right to mention it because it was with the help of an officer. But I remember, when the Germans entered [Kosovo] and wanted to rule, they were eager to find people who were already fighting one another. Naturally, in your own land, why were they killed… but it is said he killed Chetnik forces.
When the time came after World War II, I mean, he was implicated through directives, I don’t know exactly how. There was what was called the People’s Police at that time, stationed in Gurakoc. One day they were ordered to take him, by force, and execute him at Kulla e Popit in Istog. The famous kulla…you’ve read or heard about it. He was executed there, at Kulla e Popit in Istog. I want to connect this, because now I’m trying to build a bigger picture of all these figures, and I’ve read the material. This is a strange story. They crushed my father’s brother, while my father was still underage. They gave my father the birthdate and year of my uncle Brahim, even though he was still a minor. Before the sorrow of his uncle’s execution had even faded, they sent my father into the army in Travnik. They changed his date. So now my father has one date on his ID card and another on his military booklet, because I still keep them. I didn’t bring these now, and many of the things you asked me to bring as materials,I have many documents in archives that I don’t know if anyone else has. But I happened to come unprepared. I still preserve them.
One date here, another there. Why did they do this? Why did they want to…? NDSH, one way or another, they transformed it, period. They removed it, erased its traces. But at the end, after they executed his brother, this was still hanging over us. And the strangest thing is that my father was interrogated there about the brother they had executed and about the organization he belonged to. That’s according to the stories my father always told me when I was young, and I remember them. Now I want to connect it directly to one of my own cases. When I went into the army, in ’76, ’77, ’78, I was imprisoned for seven days over an incident involving a Montenegrin minority, something like that. During the military KOS investigation, this part connects directly to it…
The KOS inspector asked me about my family. He described it to me as if he knew it better than I did, down between the Drini rivers where the roads… He knew it better than I did. He asked me, “How many uncles do you have?” I said, “I have five uncles.” There were Rasa, Salih, for example, Salih, Selim, Osman, Imer, Muharrem, and my father. And one uncle… “No…” he said. “Are you sure?” I said, “I’m sure.” I wasn’t that young anymore, I was a soldier, mature enough. Right away I understood… I knew what they wanted to do to me, they wanted to convict me by connecting me to the uncle they had executed. Wherever it led, I said, “No, if it turns out I have other uncles, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then he said, “And one more thing…” I said, “Go ahead.” He said, “Don’t you have Brahim? Why aren’t you mentioning your uncle Brahim?” That struck me. Then he said, “Have you ever heard stories about your uncle Brahim?”
So, what he wanted to know was whether our family had been raised with this story, whether there was still talk about the killing of my uncle. I said, “I don’t know, but our Brahim is alive,” and I played the role so well. He said, “Which Brahim?” I said, “My uncle’s son is in Germany, an emigrant. He left for work three, four, maybe five months ago.” Back then they used to hold courses and send people off as masons, painters, and so on. I said, “Brahim is in Germany.” He said, “No, no,” he said, “your uncle.” I said, “No.” “But have you never heard of an uncle of yours called Brahim?” he asked.
The man whose name today is on a street after the liberation of Kosovo. They questioned me at length about that name, just to test me… And in reality, my grandmother, my father’s mother and the mother of that Brahim… all my childhood I remember her sitting by the stove, the floors in our house laid directly on the earth, packed dirt as they say, trampled flat. And I still remember today beans boiling on the stove while my grandmother cried, “Oh Serbia, oh Serbia, may flames consume you, you took Brahim from us leaving no trace of hi,.” Because later they said how, when they searched for my uncle Brahim, after they killed him. They took photographs, clothes, whatever he had, even his ID card, and everything disappeared. What is worse, they erased him from the documents too. If you go now, you won’t find Brahim Çetta anywhere.
Anita Susuri: They erased him completely as a person.
Xun Çetta: They executed him. And after the execution, they erased the documents, the traces.
Anita Susuri: They erased his identity.
Xun Çetta: Now, since you say there will be a summary made, I say this not by accident: after the last war in Kosovo, Serbia took the cadastral documents. They took whatever they could erase completely, and what they could not erase they calculated carefully. This connects with that. Because if you go now, you won’t find Brahim Çetta, even though it is known he existed, with documents and registration, just like all my other uncles. They erased him because they killed him, and they erased him so that he would be forgotten, as if he had never existed. But history always investigates. Imagine now, in the twenty-first century, they thought that by taking those cadastral documents they could study carefully which names to erase completely and which ones to calculate. That’s how I connect these things.
And then my own story continues with my studies. I was placed on a scholarship by the municipality in Drom 3 in Pristina. That’s where friendships began, and we started forming groups, talking, not directly at first, but gradually over time. Music did its part too. For example, when I listened to Shkurte Fejza back then, it would make you rise to your feet. Then I remembered what the inspector had tried to do to me when I was in the army. I had spent seven days in prison back then. Then the stories of my family, then the stories of my grandmother. And there, little by little, quietly and without noise, we started seeing one another and understanding who we needed to get close to. We even have some of this written down. Then certain people connected with one another, matching up. We built a good organization to work, to function without disturbances, but with one spirit.
We kept ties in the student center, in the administration. The conditions truly were not good, though to be fair, they did meet some of our needs. I want to say what is true. Whenever there was a bigger protest or outcry, they improved things. There was one, Gani Shatri, who was very aggressive in the administration over conditions, and they would improve them. But when March 11, 1981 exploded, I was not the one who organized it, though I was here. I’m not saying I don’t know who did, now I know. Because in our organization, in our indictment…our indictment had 21 students, led by Ali Lajçi, Bajram Kosumi, Musli Kosumi, Merxhan Avdyl, myself, Gani Vllana, and others, Gani Koci and the rest.
We were in one indictment of 21 students, but we were not 21 people from the same organization. Their political-juridical strategy was to gather us as if we were one organization, to strike us as a terrorist organization, and to open the case against 21 students. They would say here are three, there four, there five or six, some worked in pairs, trios, groups of four, and they put us all together and presented us as the organizers of the events of 1981. I don’t know exactly how they organized it; it was organized by four people. I’ve said the names elsewhere, I won’t go into them now and waste time. I was sentenced to 13 years. And when I went to serve them… this brings me back to what the inspector had said: “We’re sending you there because it’s better; maybe you can return alive. Nobody returned from the others.”
When I arrived there… and here too I want to say this: believe me, when we got there they tied our hands, two of us, one sitting here and one there. In Belgrade they stopped us only long enough to have a quick bite each. We reached Slovenia at around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. When we got there, they brought us soup, these dishes stacked one over another, sealed shut, with soup below and the meal above, steam still trapped inside, they had prepared them for us, and then salad too. When they set them in front of us, we were stunned: food we had never even dreamed of. I had Sadik Buja with me, now deceased. I said, “Sadik, if they keep us like this, maybe prison won’t be so bad.” He said, “No, man, it’s just the first day. Maybe it won’t be like this again.” But the whole time we stayed there, the food was like that, in Slovenia.
The privileges were completely different for ordinary prisoners, different from political prisoners, to the point that the prison administration would apologize to us. Sometimes we, the political prisoners, held meetings with the prison administration when they invited us. They would ask, whether we agreed or disagreed, “Bring us two more copies of Rilindja because three copies are not enough, we are too many. We want more literature in the Albanian language,” for example. Even the jurisprudence of Slovenia itself said, “We are aware that we are violating the law of the Republic of Slovenia with the political prisoners from Kosovo. Because you are under the treatment of Belgrade. Belgrade has ordered that you be transferred to all the republics so that you are not gathered together in one place. But we are violating the law of our republic because it is imposed on us. Political prisoners from Kosovo have a different treatment.” So there were things they could not give us the same way they gave to others, but they wanted to make us aware that…
After that, it is true that the prisons in Slovenia were far more democratic than those in the other republics. Even though I found many things there too that shocked me, things that were terrible. For example, Niš, Stara Gradiška, and all the others. But even there I found some things… I found people who had almost none of the experiences of Slovenia. But Slovenia does not mean it was all that good either, because for example, here is one who was killed in prison in Maribor. Hajredin Bala was killed there. He was a bit aggressive, they say that with the iron used for ironing {gestures like holding an iron} he smashed a guard’s face. Those kinds of situations impose themselves on you, and if someone is impatient and does not know how to calculate, they fall into the trap. They killed him. So it does not mean everything there was safe.
And then there is me myself, everyone knows this, many are still alive today. At three in the morning they brought special civilian forces from the city to maltreat me in prison and keep me down until the next day when the administration came. They beat me and left me as if dead. It was over a problem that Jungiq Stojan had set up for me. He was a Serb. The administration was exhausted by him, but that’s a long story. So even there, Slovenia had much better treatment, but if the state, the hand of the Security Service, is there, and you have it in Kosovo today and everywhere, when it comes to the Security Services they are above everything. If God lets them loose, they can do good and they can do bad.
I mean, when the Service had them under their control, the director told me, “Xun, we know what Jungiq is doing, but it is in the hands of the Service, and whether they kill or spare someone, there is nothing we can do.” We have had such great experiences, I mean, even I myself was beaten. Why? Because that Jungiq set me up with a problem. Then another problem happened to me, to transfer me, but that is a long story to tell…
Anita Susuri: Before we continue with all of that and with the demonstrations of 1981, with everything that followed, because there was more or less a change in the system, with the differentiation, the imposition of curfews, and the imprisonments, which it seems to me were at their highest in 1981 with political prisoners…
Xun Çetta: Yes.
Anita Susuri: Yes, but there was also a protest before that, in 1968, and you told me you have memories from 1968, even though you were very young.
Xun Çetta: Yes, besides the memories I have as a child, I also gave my own paper in 1968, even though I am not of that generation. I was part of the staff, I was in Switzerland when they informed me, “You have a topic, Xun Çetta: establish contact with participants of 1968 in the diaspora.” There I gathered their stories as much as I knew and could. I did have those memories. But I will stop at what I personally remember as a child, and then connect it… I was a child in 1968, exactly. We used to say the meadows beyond the white river, and I was there herding cows.
There were two wooden sheds, as you call them. Two sheds, and between them there was an open trench, what you might call a catacomb or a deep ditch. I was afraid some cow or calf might fall in, and I would have to go after them. I would throw thorns there to cover it. I knew nothing, and suddenly the helicopters came. It was the first time I had ever seen helicopters so low. I could see the pilot himself like I see you now in front of my eyes, that’s how close it seemed. One came, then another, then another. I stopped there and thought, this is not something that happens often. Later, when we returned in the evening, they told us what had happened, and they named names and everything.
Not long after, my father came…the same one I spoke about before. “So, Xun, how are you? Are you alright? What’s new today?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Were you scared?” I said, “You mean about…” {gestures upward}. He said, “Yes.” I said, “Yes father, something has happened.” He said, “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid. The students in Pristina have risen up for the flag, for that,” and he said it exactly like this, “for the same thing I was arrested some months ago.” I was young, but I knew about his arrest. There was a teacher there… and they accused him, not the teacher, but my father for influencing the school. I won’t mention names now, they are all known.
He said, “No,” he said, “now the time is coming when they will succeed.” My father said, “Don’t you be afraid. They have no business with you here herding cows. They have no business with me sitting here. They are looking for others.” I said, “But whom?” We had some students back then, I still remember them today. There was Ismail, Qazim, Nezif, and an Isuf from the village. I said, “Are they in danger, did they kill them?” He said, “No son, no. They know where to strike, they strike there, where…” and he described it to me in detail. He said, “May God let it pass.” And I remember those helicopters as if it were today, nonstop above our heads, circling there, then going off and coming back, that remains my memory.
Anita Susuri: What happened after that?
Xun Çetta: Then, in the evening. It was a Saturday market day in Peja, and the villagers came back from the market. They were saying, “You should have seen it, Xhemajl Gashi was there in the market,” Xhemajl Gashi passed away some time ago, “Ramadan Blaka was there too,” and him we knew, he had been our professor, our teacher, and now they were telling names and more names. Then the name of Zymer Neziri came up, it seemed they had seen him too… but Zymer was not known by our closer circle. Our immediate circle knew Ramadan and the others. And one of them said, “Zymer was there too, I think.” I was young there, but I understood. I knew very well that something big had broken out from… and I forgot what my father had said about Pristina, and I thought, there it is now, it has exploded. These are my memories.
Later, I recounted these stories in the book where I had my memoir – stories with participants of ’68 in the diaspora, where I live, I have all kinds of accounts. I have mentioned names too, but I won’t go further into them now. This is my own memory… and from there they wanted to push for mass displacement. Besides what was spoken in the houses. And the words of my grandmother, the words of my father …For me, somehow, they formed a kind of conclusion. If I speak differently now, that was the theme of 1968 for me.
Anita Susuri: And in your family, were you the eldest among the children?
Xun Çetta: I was the third son. I also had older cousins, but among my brothers I had one brother, Murat Çetta, the second was Muhamet Çetta, I was the third, then Rifat Çetta, and we had one sister, Fahrije Çetta. We also lived with an uncle who likewise had four sons and one daughter. And he had Brahim Çetta, the one I mentioned before, named after the hero, the martyr, however you want to call him. We gave him that name, we renewed it. He also had Ismet Çetta, Xhavit Çetta, and Fadil Çetta.
Anita Susuri: And when you continued high school in Peja, you said it was the Art School…
Xun Çetta: The Art School.
Anita Susuri: What kind of school was it?
Xun Çetta: That school was… it was called design, textile, architecture. I was in the textile sector, which meant drawing and painting. You had to make paintings. Back then the designer would take the type and shape it. In the Art School, that’s what we had. I never forget, for the first time there were these huge boards, and they made little handles on them so you could carry them like a bag {gestures with hands as if carrying something}. Because there you had to pin your work with thumbtacks in order to draw. And whenever people saw us at school with those in our hands, those big boards, because everyone had to have their own, you would open it there and draw on it. With thumbtacks you’d pin the paper and make your work. That was the Art School, the textile department.
Anita Susuri: Was it your own wish, or how did it happen that you chose it?
Xun Çetta: No, I wanted it very much, but I didn’t continue with it. Strange things have happened to me in life. I finished it, but I never continued much with art after that. Then, when I came to Pristina, I enrolled in physical education, which is the complete opposite. I loved physical education, and I still love it. Even today, at this age, I won’t even name my age because I’m old now, I still have my half-hour of morning gymnastics regularly, every single day.
But when I fell into prison, it was no longer the sport or gymnastics you would do if you were free. Going to prison took that away from me too, just as I had moved away from drawing and textiles and gone into physical education. Then prison threw physical education away too, and I turned to publicism.
That means reading and writing. I believe I could present it to you, you’ve seen it. I have sent 500–600 page texts to the highest state institutions, telling them what I see: what you are doing to the state, not us. With the injustices you are doing to this country, you are rethinking the state, you are destroying it. Since you have an oral history program now, sometimes these spoken accounts are better than written ones. I never forget the Slovenians had the Slovenia Cest Affair, just as we have our own affairs. For example, the Croats had MASPOK. In that case Stane Kavčič was the victim of the Slovenia Cest affair. That’s a history I used to know at my fingertips. When a person is given such matters, he reads the histories of other peoples as if they were his own.
Because he wants to… and when I defended Stane Kavčič to the Slovenians, I could see on their faces who liked it, though they stayed careful. I defended him a lot, very much. They slowly started watching me, paying attention to what I was writing. At first they did not want to give me the right to write. All these things I mentioned were written after they finally gave me that right. I got, I don’t know how many days in solitary confinement, just to gain the right to go out and write and send to the highest institutions of the state whatever I wanted. I was already convicted… What more could they do to me? I was sentenced, so if anything, I could only reinforce my punishment if I wrote something to them. But I wanted to tell them what they were doing.
In solitary confinement, on the third day, two men and one woman came and took me out. It’s interesting. They said, “Xun, why are you victimizing yourself for nothing at such a young age? You are already a victim of these times, protect yourself.” I said, “I want the chance to express to the highest organs of the state what I feel. And I have one question.” They said, “Go ahead.” I said, “How do you accept Edvard Kardelj of Slovenia?”
“Edvard Kardelj is the architect of the socialist democratic republic,” they told me. I said, “Okay. Then how do you explain Edvard Kardelj in a letter, because I have read Edvard Kardelj,” I said. And it was exactly like that. He could have told me, “So you’re reading Edvard Kardelj?” I read any work, no matter what it is. Even the darkest works, I like to read them, because I want to see for myself instead of just believing others.
I said, “I have read Edvard Kardelj at least three times. And the thing that left the strongest impression on me,” I said, “is the letter from prison to Ivan Maček in Belgrade,” back in the time of Serbia, the Serbo-Croat-Slovene state. I said, “It is the best book,” I said, “and why now, so many years later, has the Socialist Republic of Slovenia brought me here, and why do I not have rights?” I saw that the woman bit her lip like this {gestures biting her lip}, signaling for him to answer. They turned away, I don’t know what they discussed over there. Then they walked out the door. I was afraid, and I’m stretching this out, but what else could I do…
Anita Susuri: No, no, it’s no problem.
Xun Çetta: They went out the door and left me with one of them. They talked, and talked, and talked. Then when they came back, they said, “Xun,” they used to call me Çetta, “Çetta, be careful what you write, it is your own responsibility. We want to give you the right from today onward to send things officially. But protect yourself, you are young. Take the pillow and the blanket,” because in solitary it was just wooden boards and a blanket, and one pillow, that’s all you had. He said, “And come out,” he said, “it is too much from tomorrow onward.”
And from there on I started writing. The book of Riza is in a different way the source of those rights they later gave me… but the way I got them, by mentioning Kardelj and all that, after that I had a completely different treatment. A completely different treatment from the whole jurisprudence of Slovenia.
I had problems, of course. A Serbian guard framed me, one they called “gorilla.” That’s what they called him. He used to beat Albanians, take them into the bathroom, bloody them, beat them in prison, ordinary prisoners, not political ones. He beat them. And without giving explanations now, because to put someone in solitary they had to write a report explaining why. But he could take you into the bathroom, beat you, bring you back, and then force a cleaner to wash the blood, whoever was on duty… and the administration knew everything. He framed me with a problem when they brought those people I mentioned earlier. Special units had come from the city to maltreat me. The director himself told me.
Later another thing happened. I put him in the hospital because he set me up a second time: “Why are you listening to Radio Tirana?” He had those things in his ears, spies as they used to call them back then. He framed me again. This time he forced me completely. And on top of that, I remembered what he had done before. I put him in the hospital, and he was a guard. Then when the time came to transfer me, because I could no longer stay there, they gave me thirty days’ punishment in solitary…
Anita Susuri: Because of that beating?
Xun Çetta: Because of the beating of him, the one he had imposed on me. Before that the police had beaten me, and now a decision had been made because I was listening to Radio Tirana. That’s where I stepped in, now my chance had come. Do you believe it, the director Lorbar Emil called me to tell me, “The jurisprudence, which has had a good opinion of you because your conduct has been like this {gestures straight with hand}, those are your own views,” they respected that. He said, “But they want to transfer you from here to Koper. Mr. Çetta, thank the jurisprudence, because they said, ‘He must not be sent to Kapedon, the big prison, because anything could happen to him there.’ The prison in Koper is small, restricted, and you will pass better there. One thing,” he said, “I want to tell you.” I said, “Go ahead.”
“You are sentenced to thirty days. Now,” he said, “the decision will come, the meeting will be held,” they called it Skupština [Assembly]. He said, “Once you receive the decision, we do not want to prolong it. We want to transfer you immediately. And when the time comes to complete your thirty days,” he said, “we will arrange it for you there.” There was a man named Fisher, I’ve forgotten his full name now, he was the director there in Koper.
He said, “We want to speak with him. When the time comes for you to finish your solitary confinement, we will give you that decision there. You are sentenced, remember that,” he said, “and we will make it possible for you once a month to go out into the city of Koper, by the seaside, with guards,” he said, “to relax a bit because you have suffered, with guards.”
And when the time came for me to finish… I went. They transferred me, they took me in one of those prison vans, the guards, the police as we called them. They took me there, questioned me, settled me in, placed me with others, and we began. Three days passed, maybe four or five, what they call quarantine, you know, just to stay one or two nights there before going among the other prisoners.
When I was being transferred there, I was received well. By then I had forgotten all about it. Then one of my psychologists, she was quite old, an older woman, a psychologist, said to me, “Mr. Çetta,” she said, “I would recommend something.” I said, “Go ahead.” In her office alone, she said, “You should make a request to go out spremstvo,” that’s what they called it, meaning “under escort,” “to ask if you can go out into the city accompanied by a guard,” because, she said, “you are burdened and all that.” Then I remembered the words he had told me before, and I said, “Yes, yes, but I don’t know how possible it is.” She said, “Take it.” She gave me the form to fill out. I filled out the form. The meetings were now held publicly, in the presence of the prisoners and the prison administration. My request was brought forward.
The administration unanimously said, “Yes, because as it is, we are already violating the rights of the political prisoners from Kosovo,” just as they had told me back there in Ljubljana. They said, “This is no violation at all, we’ll simply assign him one guard.” So they arranged exactly what had been promised to me there: “When the time comes for you to finish solitary confinement, you’ll at least be in the city there…”
Anita Susuri: And did you go out into the city?
Xun Çetta: We did. We went out, we walked around, we sat down. I paid for lunch. The guard didn’t want to let me pay, but I paid. Because we worked and got a percentage of wages. For example, if the salary for the work was 300 euros, you would get 30 euros, let’s say. We worked there, the prison would bring in work, assembly jobs and things like that. I went out into the city with the guard escorting me, just as they had reminded me back in Ljubljana: “We have to send you like this, because it is better for you. We didn’t send you to a big prison. In a big prison, the furnace would eat you up,” that’s how they used to put it. With the Slovenians I have only one regret: we didn’t know how to behave toward them properly, both normally and politically. Because they had shown understanding for all our struggles, and I know that well. Later, the cultural association Migjeni even came to visit me in prison in Ljubljana, and then you…
Anita Susuri: From Albania?
Xun Çetta: No, from Kosovo. Sali Kabashi, Naim Maloku, Gani Bujqinca…well, Gani later, and there was also Boris Vuku from Slovenia, from that region they call Primorska, the coastal region, near Portorož, close to Koper. He was a member there.
They came to visit me in prison under the framework of those rights and such things. They had that possibility back then. They said, “We are from the Migjeni association, in contact over there.” Then Franco Juri came to visit me too, an Italian minority member who later became ambassador to Argentina. Through him, little by little, I was connected from there to the Migjeni association, the same one where, as you may remember, Sali Kabashi and Naim Maloku were leading figures.
When I got out of prison after eight and a half years, almost nine, I spent my first night at Boris Vuku’s place. I even have it in writing how he had arranged it together with a Dutch journalist. When I arrived there, I found that Jasha Zobec had also come from Zagreb, a well-known name. It was a very interesting first night. The second night I stayed with Naim Maloku in Ljubljana, then three or four nights there.
And there, both among the former political prisoners and with the Migjeni association in Ljubljana, all those solutions we had been arranging through Boris Vuku and the others became reality, because they had maintained good relations with the association.Then, when they wanted to sentence me, which is very interesting, they wanted to sentence me for that incident I told you about, to bring me to trial and sentence me again.
Anita Susuri: For the beating of…
Xun Çetta: Yes. But by then I was in Koper, while the court was in Ljubljana. The guards got ready, just like when they had brought me before, to take me there for trial. When I arrived there… there’s even a photograph of it, I think it’s in the book… Sali Kabashi was there, Franco Juri was there, and Boris Vuku had come too. They had arranged a lawyer for me, from Peter Čeferin. He was there to defend me because an injustice was being done to me. I was already sentenced, and now they wanted to…
The procedure began, but they didn’t drag it out. They said, “Fine, until the future, because we still have other people to question about this case,” and they left it at that. When I came out, the lawyer said to me, “Listen, this matter is over.” “Why?” I asked. He said, “Because both the prosecutor and everyone else are saying that things are changing. There are doubts, so they’re leaving it like this for now, until they see what the situation brings.” And that’s how it ended. There’s a photograph of when they came for me, with the lawyer they had arranged to defend me in prison, all of them are there in front of the prison.
Anita Susuri: How many years had passed since you were in prison when that beating happened, after which you later got to go out walking?
Xun Çetta: It was around ‘86 or ‘87. I had been there since ‘81, so maybe five or six years. As for Ljubljana, when we were there, there wasn’t much we could really say. There’s something I wanted to mention about that, but I don’t really feel like it. If Slovenia was like that, I also met people here and there who were allowed to go home to their families.
Anita Susuri: Really? There were cases like that?
Xun Çetta: Yes, in other prisons. I have names, some of them admitted it to me themselves. And I say, we need to tell those things too, not rush to paint everything only black. You can make it as dark as you want, because life itself is dark enough. But there are some things we shouldn’t hesitate to acknowledge. For example, I know people who studied while in prison. They slept with us, and then they went to their studies. Shefki Shatri, for instance, finished veterinary school.
Anita Susuri: And how was that possible?
Xun Çetta: It was possible. He was young, he did his work there, and the prison financed him to go and complete it. I can’t speak badly about that. There was Arif Demolli too, a sharp writer. Strong-minded in every way. He was sentenced to I don’t know how many years. He served his sentence with us. And he even went home to his family from there. Now I want to say this, if these are really meant to be testimonies, it’s better for at least someone to know the truth.
Anita Susuri: Yes, yes.
Xun Çetta: Can anyone deny it? Never. Why? Because the Slovenians themselves said: “As much as we can, we will do everything. But we know very well that we are violating the laws imposed by the Republic of Serbia.” They even had special rooms; if someone had committed a serious crime, his wife could come and stay with him in a room, as if they were at home. So that life would not be severed from the future, because today he is in prison, but tomorrow he will be free. They are trying to introduce that now in Kosovo too, I see it.
There were also people here who worked outside. They would go out to work, but the prison would take their salary. They worked in companies, there were even such cases. As for me, as an example, they gave me the right to go out. I was the only one sentenced to 13 years, a very heavy sentence. All my comrades would go outside the prison to work, still under the prison system but outside. They would leave the building. One worked in metal-dyeing, dipping iron into chemicals to color it. Another worked in agriculture. Fadil Blakaj worked there, dealing with production. They were practically in freedom.
For the first time, the administration gave me the opportunity to go out. I got ready, we had to line up. I used to have only a small window, and I would watch them from there when the workers went out. I myself only had the door opening and the work from one door to the next, what they called assembly work. A heavy and unsuitable sentence. Everyone there knows it.
When the administration granted me the right to go out, I was overjoyed. I went there and stood in line with the others, ready to leave and work outside. Then the guard looked at me and shouted: “Četta, nazad!” Nazad in Serbian means “back.” I asked, “Why?” He said, “You cannot go out.” “But the day before yesterday,” I said, “the prison administration decided and gave me that right.” “No, you can’t,” he said, and sent me back. The story is long and time is short. But I was deeply upset. They turned me back. So I dug in my heels and for five days I refused to work. Like this: sleeping, corridor, work, work in the room. A totally closed type of confinement. Then I said, “I won’t work here either.” The administration came, one after another. They said, “An injustice has been done to you. We know who did it. We gave you the opportunity.” But it was the black hand of those Services, the same ones I keep talking about. That’s how it later came out with that Jungiq Stojan I mentioned. They never let me go.
Not a single day did they allow me to work in the open system. Requests were made for short trips into the city, others were allowed to go, and people went continuously. That’s why it’s better to explain these things properly, so later generations don’t just hear explosions of half-truths. I’ve always said: prison is prison, no matter how you turn it around. Prison is bad, it takes everything from you. But it was different from the other prisons. Still, it wasn’t some ideal prison either. We suffered there too. Hajredin Bala was killed there, killed in prison. That casts a dark shadow over Slovenia. Ten special guards came for me too, to abuse me in prison, in the middle of the night when there weren’t enough regular guards. That too is a dark stain. The guards themselves admitted it, and so did the prison director.
That means, when the authorities put their hands on you, it is hard to escape them. It depends on how well you know how to calculate, but these events, they themselves do not even know how to organize and explain in detail how the system functioned. I have seen people even in positions who were better than my own close friend. Hand on my heart. Because you see it, you see that they dare to act like you, he is not there, leave it, but he dares.
I have seen Slovenes, man, exactly like an insert. One from the Directorate of Prisons of Slovenia told me. He says, “Xun,” after they had given me the right to write, he says, “Xun, why don’t you take a good insert about Tito,” he says, “put it as a piece of writing and then twist it.” And for a person from the directorate to tell you this, it is no small thing. You know, he says, “It is a mitigating circumstance to call one deed good, all of them are black,” he told me. I said, “I do not deal with Tito, I deal with what is happening.” “But within that framework, skillfully work on it yourself. Take one of his good deeds and then criticize.”
He was looking at it, looking at it, and he had read a place where I had sent a letter, because they do not send letters without analyzing them. Where I say, imagine where the fate of Albanians is when Tito himself says, the one who has nine children, I am the godfather of the tenth child, I became godfather to each of them. Meanwhile in Kosovo they began to wipe out the birthrate, they have laws of segregation against our people. It is in contradiction with the very head of the state.
Now I had written it unconsciously, I wrote as my logic worked. Then, “Here I will take you as an example,” he said, “how well you have done it,” and he read it to me. “Do you know how good this is,” he said, “this is convincing. You say Tito did well when he says I am the godfather of the tenth child whoever has them, and immediately you say to the Albanians you have made laws on how to stop the Albanian birthrate. Did you say anything else?” He wanted to make me say something else good about Tito and then it came to my mind. “Well, many, many things would have to be said,” I said, “I hear cases where no one knows who to find one good thing about, but I see what is happening and what is being done.” That means…
