Two Childhoods on Opposite Ends of the Kosovo War: A Conversation between hbs Colleagues

Q: Granit, can you share what you remember of 1999, or even before that, can you take a step back and share your earliest memories of the context and surroundings in which you lived leading up to March 1999?

Granit:

I remember how divided our communities were. In the Peja city center, you'd walk on different sides depending on your ethnicity – Serbs here, Albanians there. You could feel the separation even without seeing open hostility.

There was this "police hour", a curfew where nobody could leave home after 2 PM. Lots of smuggling was happening since Yugoslavia was under sanctions. Goods came through Montenegro, and my city being near the border became a hub for this. Funny enough, some of those smugglers are now big-shot oligarchs.

We lived near the old bazaar, where people sold cigarettes and small things while police did daily raids. The Serbian police would chase them, and you could feel ethnic divisions getting worse. Everything seemed tied to ethnicity. Serbs were the minority but had power, while Albanians, the majority, faced all kinds of oppression. By then, everyone could feel how deep the segregation had become.

We had a coffee shop that stayed open during curfew. Police would show up often, and inside, men from the area would drink and play patriotic songs – my dad included, since he was the owner. Living upstairs, we'd play '90s pop hits and folk songs, depending on what guests wanted. It was like being in some weird movie. Everything was risky since the police could hurt someone for the smallest thing. But as a kid, there was this strange excitement, like living in an action film where daily struggles just became normal.

Q: How did your family manage to keep the coffee shop running during such tense times? 

Granit:

Keeping the coffee shop open, with music playing so loud, was basically an act of rebellion. At least that's how my dad saw it.

Family-owned kafeneja/kafana 'Koli', in Peja/Peć, 1996/97. Sokol (Granit's brother, second from the left), Granit (first from the right), with neighbors - family archive.

Yugoslavia had been falling apart since 1990, and Albanians were treated more and more like second-class citizens. You could see it in how authorities acted. I remember walking with my mom past a policeman with a big rifle. I got curious and looked at his weapon, and he yelled at me so viciously it felt like he wanted to kill me right there. We weren't hurt, probably because attacking a child and his mother would've looked bad. But this showed me how open the divisions had become.

The city was split along ethnic lines. Living near the center, we saw protests almost daily – Albanians one day, Serbs the next. As kids, we'd join both sometimes. I remember Albanians using the victory sign, while Serbs used the three-finger symbol. Once, a Serb neighbor saw us doing the victory sign, pulled us out of the protest, and took us home. Hate speech was everywhere, though solidarity among Albanians was really strong, as you'd expect.

The nineties were terrible. Totally insane. The world felt like it was falling apart, and we became prisoners of our own fear, staying inside during curfews. The world we knew got smaller and smaller, and all we wanted was to be left alone in our living rooms with our tea, alcohol, TV, and whatever small comforts we had. We just wanted to be left in peace.

That wasn't living, it was just surviving. The economy crashed. Unemployment was everywhere. Schools ran in this weird parallel system. The dinar became almost worthless. Public life disappeared, with shopkeepers being the only thread holding the community together. It was beyond depression – a society in retreat, grabbing at bits of normalcy while everything fell apart.

This continued through the late nineties, when public institutions were run almost entirely by Serbs, making us feel even more like second-class citizens. Before all this ethnic tension and segregation, the system had created a class of committed socialists – people who truly believed in what the state promoted.

 

Q: In such circumstances, could you sense, even as a child, a deterioration at an every-day level, the situation becoming unbearable?

Granit:

Yeah, definitely. I remember a Serb celebration in the city in late 1998. I think the Yugoslav volleyball team had won something, and Serbs were celebrating everywhere, firing rifles into the air. I was inside our house, hearing their songs and hateful chants while bullets hit our roof. I was terrified, but my mom and older brother were playing Nintendo, trying to get me to join them to keep my mind off it.

I also remember how relationships with our Serbian and Montenegrin neighbors slowly fell apart. Being seen together became awkward, like invisible lines had been drawn by all these daily incidents. Some joined police or military, stepping fully into the conflict.

One memory stands out: a neighbor in uniform talking with his mother outside. He raised his voice, almost like he wanted us to hear, saying we should leave before the raids started, taking whatever we could. It felt like a warning wrapped in a goodbye. Even friendships faded, like people felt forced to pick sides. Looking back, it seems everyone knew war was coming, but we clung to our homes, hoping things might somehow go back to normal.

Q: Is the bombing something that the Albanian population wished for, was it being discussed as such, or did it come as a surprise?

Granit:

It was a huge surprise. We couldn't imagine NATO bombing Yugoslavia. Everyone said Yugoslavia was too strong, too untouchable – nobody would dare bomb it. That belief collapsed when it actually happened, but until then, it seemed impossible.

I think this is why the KLA formed alongside Rugova's peace movement. Rugova didn't think foreign intervention would happen, so he pushed for peaceful resistance and international diplomacy. Some say he really believed this was the only way forward, and I like to think so too. But the killings and oppression continued, especially in villages where people suffered much worse attacks than in cities.

Eventually, rage boiled over, and people in those areas just said, "Enough. If this is how it's going to be, we'll fight back – we won't just sit waiting for a miracle." When NATO finally started bombing, it shocked everyone.

 

Q: And so we arrive at the main topic we're reminiscing about, your respective recollections of March 1999… What are your memories of it?

Granit:

That period was just anxiety and fear. Every day brought something to keep you on edge. I remember drunk Serbian policemen rushing at us in their car, shouting things we couldn't understand because our Serbian wasn't good. There was constant danger in every interaction, plus harsh violence and open battles in villages around my city. This was just before NATO started bombing.

I remember the night of March 24 clearly. We were watching Albanian TV when they announced NATO had begun airstrikes. Belgrade was being hit! My parents jumped with joy. It felt like a miracle, something we thought impossible because of all the political obstacles. This move by the West felt like a blessing.

That same night, Serbs – both civilians and military – came out to make sure no one celebrated or showed any reaction. Inside homes, though, people were quietly celebrating. I imagine it was the same in most neighborhoods. In ours, with some Montenegrin and Serbian families nearby, we couldn't show any emotion openly.

Q: Nemanja, you were even younger in 1999, just a toddler basically. And the local context was, of course, vastly different. Do you have any recollection of the bombing and how you first learned about it?

Nemanja:

My experience with the bombing… Actually I remember it quite well even though I was four at the time, because it was quite cinematic in a way.

Nemanja in a park in the Braće Jerković neighbourhood, Belgrade, 1999 - family archive

We lived in Belgrade, in the Braće Jerković neighbourhood at the time, in an old socialist skyscraper. At the time of the bombing, we were concerned that, since our building was quite tall, maybe they would target it specifically, or maybe there would be a stray rocket or shrapnel or something, so at the time I remember the concern was always to avoid being in tall structures when the bombing was taking place.

We survived this first bombing in Belgrade, which I don't remember directly. But the second time, we were in Kraljevo and we went there to escape the bombing, but they ended up bombing Kraljevo too. I remember it was the dead of night and I heard something rumbling through the windows and I remember saying to my aunt, we were at her place at the time, I said: "Auntie it's thunder outside!", and she said "No. They are bombing us!". So it's very cinematic… If you were directing a movie on the bombing that's how you'd do it.

So that's one memory. I don't remember whether it was the same occasion, the same night, or some later night, but I remember this apartment in Kraljevo where we were, also a Yugoslav brutalist building, 11-12 storeys high, and the concern was again with the height and whether we would get hit because of it, so the consensus was: We are all going to the basement, because we would be safe there. On reflection as an adult, it was ridiculous because if they hit the building it would have collapsed on us. The electricity was cut, everything was dark, the elevators were not working, and we were on the 11th, last floor, I remember we scrambled to get to the basement, taking the stairs, and everybody was out of their apartments, our neighbors, flooding the stairs, and we realized nobody had a flashlight and it was dark, so my contribution to our going to the basement was that I had this – I distinctly remember this green fluorescent toy car that had electric headlights, so I went ahead first holding my green car, and its headlights served as flashlights as we were descending to the basement for safety. We spent the night there, nobody bombed us in particular, but a military base was bombed.

The interesting thing is that I remember the time of the bombing almost exclusively as a happy childhood memory. I remember being in Kraljevo with my aunt, going out every day to swim in the Ibar river, take long walks to the foothills of the Stolovi mountain; I remember visiting some overgrown socialist memorials, etc. On reflection, it was just the two of us at all of these locations, but I didn't think much of it at the time. Much later, my aunt revealed to me that she had gone on all of these adventures with me to avoid residential areas during the bombing. The logic was, if they start going after the civilian population, they are certainly not going to bomb the great outdoors. Everyone else was holed up in their apartments, too scared to go out. So ironically, some of my happiest childhood memories were made possible by the existential fear of the bombing…

Nemanja with his father at the Tašmajdan park, Belgrade, 1999 - family archive

I remember the surrounding attitude which I think is also very interesting to note. What I got from the adults was a kind of defiant attitude. I don't remember there being much fear, I remember this attitude of "Fuck them!", this kind of indignation – "How dare they do this to us, we'll get them back". I remember two things specifically… there was a chant of sorts, that I didn't understand at the time but I do now – Monika stisni zube (Monica, clench your teeth!), referring to Bill Clinton's scandal, and then the Riblja Čorba song "Avionu, slomiću ti krila" (Airplane, I will break your wings!) was particularly popular in those days, with lots of airplay. It was an earlier song, it wasn't written with the bombing in mind, it was repurposed as a kind of resistance to it.

There was a strong sense of community, that everybody was in this together, but nobody was talking about why it was happening. There was absolutely no self-reflection about the cause of the bombing, I just knew we were being bombed, as if someone decided out of the blue: "We don't like these Serbs, let's bomb them!"

 

Q: Do you remember anything about the politics of the time?

Nemanja:

When it comes to politics and my involvement in it, this is where I had the most difficulty reconstructing the timeline of events. I was taken to various rallies for the opposition, but I don't know whether this was before or after the bombing, I just remember a few things. At the time, we were living in Braće Jerković, my mother, father and I, with my father's mother, my grandmother, all together. While my mom and dad were at work, I was usually left with my grandmother who, as all grandmothers did and continue to do, was watching Pink TV and RTS. On national TV, there was all this Milošević propaganda, Slobodan Milošević was someone who was familiar to me, he was my president. One time, it could have been in the Spring of 1999, when my aunt and I were coming back to Belgrade from Kraljevo by bus, the bus stopped to admit three soldiers in full uniform, carrying guns. My aunt objected to them coming on board with the guns, so the driver made the soldiers stow them in the back. One of them, annoyed, sat next to me, and I looked at him, awestruck, and whispered under my breath: "Wow, a soldier of the fatherland!". My aunt claims she saw a single tear roll down the soldier's cheek on hearing that.

Later on, my other aunt would take me to several opposition rallies, including one, I believe in Niš, a Koštunica rally, I think it was ahead of the presidential election, so most likely after the bombing. She carried me on her shoulders, and I asked what this was, who this was, and she told me this is Koštunica, he's running against Milošević. I remember saying: "What is this Koštunica doing to my Sloba?, often quoted in my family, "Šta hoće ta Koštunica", so, yes, I misgendered Koštunica.

Anyway, then they explained to me that Milošević was bad, and I was like: "Oh really!?" So I was actually taken to a few opposition protests and rallies, and that's where my opposition politics started.

Q: Granit, after the initial surprise and relief, how did things unfold for you and your family?

Granit:

Once the bombing started, Serb forces went into a rage. Paramilitary groups began committing atrocities. Mass deportations started happening. They'd storm homes, drag people out, and gather them in the city center.

This happened twice that I remember – people being sent mostly to Albania, but also to Montenegro. Most were loaded onto trucks and taken to Albania, often dropped near the border.

We were staying at my aunt's when, two days later, paramilitaries came back for those who hadn't left. They knew many wouldn't go willingly. I remember them coming down our street, talking with a Montenegrin neighbor woman who told them who was still hiding.

They came to our house but had trouble finding the door since it was an old Ottoman-style house with a hidden entrance. My dad had blocked the door with a large stove, but they forced their way in. They gave us five minutes: "Leave or we'll kill you." We had no choice.

As we left, Serbs shouted insults at us from their homes. I remember my mother changing my younger brother's diaper while sitting on the ground. In that situation, some people made sarcastic remarks about gymnastics being good for one's health, or that we deserved this, as we walked toward the trucks. It shows how divided everyone had become. Looking back, we were lucky things didn't get worse.

They ordered us to the city's basketball hall for the night. Later, we found out they sent us there because the hall was next to the military base. The idea was if NATO bombed the base, they might hit civilians too – we were human shields. That's what we were told, though NATO never bombed that area.

The next morning they told us to pack again and walk to the city center where trucks and buses waited to take us to Albania or Montenegro. The base and hall were near my aunt's house. Her husband, who we picked up on the way, was hiding in the ceiling and was totally shocked when we found him. He talked about seeing bulldozers and trucks at night digging mass graves, but we didn't believe him then. He was clearly traumatized.

We spent another night at their house. The next morning, we asked a neighbor and friend of my aunt's to drive all seven of us to the bus station. Since he was Montenegrin, we could pass checkpoints, which probably saved our lives.

Some people walked to Montenegro on their own. That's what we decided to do, heading to Rožaje, the nearest town. At the final checkpoint, I saw broken storefronts and groups of Roma and Ashkali people along the way. They mocked us as we lined up for buses. This stuck with me, later coming up in family talks to explain, though unfairly, the revenge some Albanians took against other minorities after the war.

I remember sneaking into some broken shops and grabbing what I could. We didn't get a spot on the bus, so we joined others walking to Montenegro. As we climbed the mountains, we could see our city burning below. In Rožaje, Bosniaks welcomed us warmly. That night, we slept in a stable with a horse. It was surprisingly okay – the stove made it warm, though more people arrived during the night, and the horse had to go outside, which it wasn't happy about.

The next day, we went to Ulcinj, hoping to find connections since there were strong ties between Ulcinj and Peja. We were shocked when some Albanians there questioned us: "How dare you rise against this state?" It hurt to hear that from fellow Albanians.

We had nowhere to stay in Ulcinj and no money, so we broke into a villa! I went with my father, my aunt's husband, and a family friend. We stayed there ten days – it was the biggest house I'd ever been in.

Food was scarce. Humanitarian aid often got taken by locals before reaching refugees. We lived on simple meals like bread with sugar. Neighbors weren't friendly, though they seemed to understand our situation.

Eventually, we took a bus to Albania. Through distant relatives, we ended up staying at the Shkodra mayor's house for one night – total luxury for refugees. But Shkodra itself was in terrible shape – still damaged from Hoxha's regime and 1990s civil unrest.

From there we went to Durrës with help from family. We wanted to join my mother's family in Macedonia, but they'd closed the border, leaving us stuck. Thankfully, our host family in Durrës was wealthy, unusual for Albania then. They gave us a small apartment where we stayed three months.

Durrës got the most aid since it's Albania's largest port. Over time, food became plentiful, and I even gained and lost weight during our stay.

But Durrës was chaotic. Streets weren't paved, guns were everywhere, and violence happened daily. My brother and father saw a murder during a walk – shocking to us, but seemingly normal for locals. After their civil war, Albanians seemed distrustful and divided. For us, it was hard to understand seeing the same nation so broken.

Still, the hospitality we experienced in Albania was amazing. I'm still deeply grateful to our host family and to Albania. That feeling won't ever go away.

My brother and I made friends in the neighborhood. We quickly picked up the central Albanian dialect, which was very different from ours. Talking with each other was fun, bridging gaps through laughter and games.

The family that took us in was incredibly kind. They let us stay in their apartment for a few weeks before moving us to their property – a parking lot. My father got a job as a watchman. For my brother and me, the parking lot became our playground. We spent days with the watchdogs, playing with our new friends. Meanwhile, my parents obsessed over news or visited a nearby refugee camp run by Italians.

Dining table in the parking lot in Durrës, Albania, where Granit's family lived in May/June 1999. Granit's father (Feti) and brother Sokol on the right, person on the left, unknown - family archive.

Then one day, we got the news: NATO had forced Yugoslavia to surrender. The bombing had ended. After three months in Durrës, my father took a chance. He sneaked onto a truck heading back to Kosovo to check our house.

When he reached our city, Yugoslav troops were gone and KFOR had arrived. Our house was still standing. Back in Durrës, we waited anxiously, afraid he might not return. When he finally came back with the news, we had hope again. Two weeks later, we packed our few things and headed home, leaving behind the parking lot, the watchdogs, and the life we'd pieced together in exile.

Q: When the whole family eventually returned, what did you find back home? And how did everyday life continue?

Granit:

Coming back was striking. We returned to a city in ruins. The smell of burnt buildings stayed for two years. Most infrastructure was destroyed or damaged. People lived in tents or makeshift shelters, but there was still this strange joy and optimism.

Our house wasn't burned, but almost everything inside was stolen. Everywhere, people shared war stories – constantly, all talking at once – but weirdly upbeat given what they'd been through. There were celebrations, people drinking and dancing, even when food was scarce.

Carshia e Gjate - Old Bazaar, Peja 1999 August//September - a few meters from Granit's family house. Credit: Lubomir Kotek/OSCE

Return of a shopkeeper in the destroyed city old bazaar of Peja/Pec, Kosovo, summer 1999, Credit: Lubomir Kotek/OSCE

After the war, things changed. Some neighbors, especially those who'd recently moved from villages to the city, criticized us for using Serbian words. Back then, Serbian words were still common in our vocabulary.

I remember playing with kids, and if someone said "košarka" (basketball), they'd get corrected: "No, say 'koshi' in Albanian! That's forbidden now." We'd obey, and over time, this changed how we spoke. Many Serbian words got replaced with English ones.

Q: How did these linguistic changes after the war reflect the broader social changes taking place?

Granit:

Along with these language changes came more stereotypes and hate. We started using negative phrases about Serbs. Most Albanians believed Serbs couldn't be trusted. Even if they seemed nice, people would say it was just an act, just politics. This thinking became really common and it feels like it still is.

The fear of being treated as less than human still affects people today. Sometimes people joke, "If I bring a Serb over, you'll behave properly," but it shows how deep that mark goes when you've been treated as inferior. It's hard to forget that.

"Shkja/Shkije" is an old Albanian word for Serb/s, but it became hateful, especially during the 90s. Some connect it to a word meaning "Shky/shqyes – to rip apart," suggesting Serbs were called this because they were destructive – supposedly since ancient times.

After the war, UNMIK made efforts to discourage the use of the term, recognizing that it had come to be regarded as hate speech. I don't believe the word was originally intended to be offensive, but the conflict seems to have altered its meaning.

Fear stayed with us, though. I remember constant warnings about mines left by Serb forces. Burned houses and tall grass became forbidden areas, rumored to hide deadly traps or bombs disguised as toys. This haunted me and kept me from sleeping, especially because I loved toys.

Another worry was being kidnapped by new gangs that formed after foreigners arrived. A classmate was kidnapped but rescued by KFOR. Strangely, he was taken from class to class to tell his story. Teachers thought this would be a good lesson, but looking back, it was a terrible way to teach us about the dangers around us.

Nemanja:

When it comes to my awareness of what was happening during the bombing, I had absolutely no clue who Albanians were, that they existed. It actually took me a long time to kind of discover all these things for myself because nobody taught them to me. It took me a while, maybe shamefully many years to find out that "Shiptars" and Albanians are the same thing, because these groups were mentioned to me in different contexts. For example, Shiptars in football, whenever there was a Serbia vs Albania game, all of my peers would go after the Shiptars, I had no clue who these people were, I just knew from context that being a Shiptar was bad. There was also a disgusting apelike tradition in the locker room before and after gym class, when we would change back into school clothes, that went: "Ko ne skače taj je šiptar", so you needed to jump to avoid being labelled a Shiptar. And then, Albanian…I never heard about Albanians, the only context I had was at my chess club of all places. In chess there are these things called openings, already pre-calculated and theorized sequences of opening moves that you would memorize, which all had their names, for example, the Sicilian, the Italian, the Scandinavian, the Queen's Gambit and so on. At our club, whenever someone would play an unorthodox opening which was considered particularly dumb, playing a random pawn, completely untheorized, our coach would say: "He's playing the Albanian opening – igra Albanku". It was an insult, like nobody but the stupidest people would play it. It was the only thing I knew about Albanians, it took me a while to learn that these were the same people.

 

Q: How do you think the narratives prevalent in education affected young people's understanding of what had happened?

Granit:

In school, we learned about the conflict in 5th grade history. The curriculum was new then. What we learned focused mainly on male fighters – only those who fought got recognized, while other struggles were ignored.

Serbs weren't discussed much; they were just portrayed as bad guys. The message was that fighting back was the only response to oppression, and the KLA's resistance was shown as the right approach. This was presented as why NATO eventually stepped in. The KLA's decision to arm themselves was seen as crucial in convincing NATO to support them. That was the main message from people who took up arms.

The peaceful resistance was mentioned sometimes, but it was also overlooked.

After the war, the KLA became a kind of authority, directing anger – and sometimes violence – toward those seen as collaborators or sympathizers with Serbia. But beneath this were older divides: the longstanding contempt from cities toward villages, where people were often dismissed as peasants – something dating back to Ottoman times.

In the 1990s, this divide grew worse, even as leaders preached Albanian unity. After the war, unity gave way to revenge, as rural people settled scores with urban ones. City people went back to looking down on villagers, and while solidarity remained the main story, cracks appeared.

This created a certain openness that made it easier to explore the complexities. For example, there were cases where people from the "enemy" side risked themselves to help others, including saving my family. After the war, villagers became more hostile toward city dwellers, while city people downplayed villagers' heroism with comments like, "It wasn't just you, we were all involved" or "It wasn't just you, it was NATO who pushed the enemy back."

The tension between peaceful and violent approaches had no middle ground until 2-3 years after the war, when people slowly began discussing nuances and moved away from absolute views of Serbs. This openness let us explore both the good and bad parts of the previous system.

This shift has sparked new debates in society. Surprisingly, it sometimes goes to another extreme, where people might dehumanize others from their own ethnic group over small flaws anyone might have.

Q: Nemanja, what about your experience with how this period was taught in Serbian schools? What kind of narrative did you encounter?

Nemanja:

There was ample time between the NATO bombing and when the time came for me to learn about it in school, for there to be historical distance and some lessons learned and a curriculum drafted. What ended up happening was, since the teaching of history is chronological, and this was the most recent history that we had in our books, when we reached modern history, the lesson on the wars of the 90s was left for the last class before the end of the school year, so it was very easy for the professors to just skip it. In both primary and high school, we skipped over the lessons dealing with the wars of the 1990s. In high school I remember taking a look at the lesson, just for my own information. I remember the NATO bombing being mentioned, not saying why we were being bombed, but the bulk of the lesson was about Oluja, with a big picture of the tractors and convoys out of Croatia, so the lesson itself – which we didn't do – focused on Serbian martyrdom and mentioned nothing of any crimes committed by the Serbian side, or why the bombing happened.

My impression both in primary and high school was that the teachers actually took this opportunity to avoid teaching about it, because they probably knew that the textbooks were BS and they didn't want the cognitive dissonance of teaching us something that was state-sponsored. That's my impression of my history teachers, who were both very good, not nationalistic in their politics, but it was a hot potato and they wanted to avoid it, using the end of the school year. That's why to this day I don't have the full picture...

Yet, in defense of my history teachers, you could tell their politics by how they covered Serbian medieval history. They were really telling us about Milutin and Dragutin pulling each other's eyes out, being Ottoman vassals, considering taking on the Islamic faith, all of this medieval nonsense that took place, which is being sanitized, like, "They were Christian rulers". But our teachers told us the way it was, that they were brutal, hypocritical, having constant talks with the pope on converting to Catholicism, whatever it takes. There was this myth-busting aspect, which is maybe why this nationalist thing never took root in me in particular.

I would also be remiss not to mention the excellent civic education I got in primary school. I had a great civics teacher whom I actually credit with me being here today, because she taught us all about tolerance and democracy. I think for me the program of introducing civic education was a massive success, it instilled in me the awareness that there are others, that there being others in no way affects me, my life, etc. It also awakened in me a desire to deal with politics as such, that later on was upgraded through my secondary school, but it was really here that my passion for social studies was ignited.

Q: What are your impressions of this conversation, is there a note you'd like to end it with?

Nemanja:

I will close by recounting an anecdote of the first time Granit and I met. It was in 2020, during a trip to Kosovo to promote our publication, Perspectives, marking 20 years since the end of the war in Kosovo. Granit had been recommended to us as a local "fixer" who had contacts with the media and could arrange for them to cover our event. After the event was over, the team had lunch together with Granit, who impressed me as a boisterous, gregarious, bearded ginger man with a clearly articulated progressive political stance and an ability to laugh at the excesses of national sentiments across both sides. He told us about kids born in the late 1990s in Kosovo being named after Western politicians who supported the NATO intervention with first names like Tonyblair, Billclinton and Madeleinealbright, and I told him that those same people are the subject of a range of wacky conspiracy theories where they hate Serbs and Serbia so viscerally that they would stop at nothing to destroy us. We shared a good laugh about these absurdities. It was clear that he was a man after my own heart, even though at 24, this had been my first time holding a conversation with an Albanian. In contrast to many of my peers, I have been fortunate enough to be able to say that this artificial national divide has never really mattered.  

Granit:

Coming from opposite sides of the same history - me from Peja, you from Belgrade - we grew up with very different understandings of the war. In Kosovo, resistance was central; in Serbia, the conflict was often ignored or distorted. Still, both of us questioned the narratives we inherited and ended up working on a sense of justice and memory. I remember first meeting you back in 2020, during the hbs team's visit to Prishtina and presentation of the Perspectives issue. You were mostly quiet, but very present. You laughed at my jokes, especially the ones ridiculing the nationalist stances in our societies which told me more than words could. I never told you this, but I sensed in you a sharp compass for fairness and a critical eye toward the systems we live in. That alone was enough to see you as a friend. Little did I know we'd actually end up working together.
I really like that this conversation was about putting perspectives side by side and making space for nuance and for really talking about first-hand and second-hand, personal, intergenerational, and collective traumas. This may bring nothing more than a space to sit with discomfort and the best truth we know, but in a region shaped by silence and selective memory, even that feels like a meaningful step.

 Granit (left) and Nemanja (right). Belgrade, 2023. Personal archive

 

Brief Timeline of Key Events
 

1989 – Autonomy of Kosovo is revoked by Serbia under Slobodan Milošević; repression of Kosovo Albanians begins to intensify.

1990s – Kosovo Albanians establish parallel systems in response to heavy state discrimination.

1996–1999 – Armed conflict escalates between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Serbian/Yugoslav forces.

March 1999 – NATO launches an air campaign against Yugoslavia after failed peace negotiations and growing violence on the ground.

March–June 1999 – In retaliation, Serbian forces conduct widespread deportations, mass killings, and ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians.

June 1999 – Serbian forces withdraw; NATO-led KFOR and UNMIK assume control over security and governance in Kosovo.

2008 – Kosovo declares independence from Serbia, which remains unrecognized by Serbia and other, mostly non-Western countries.

Glossary of Terms

UNMIK: United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, responsible for governing Kosovo after the war (1999 onward).

KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army): Ethnic Albanian paramilitary organization that fought Serbian forces during the 1990s.

Resistance: In the Kosovar context, refers to both armed resistance (KLA) and non-violent resistance led by civil society and Kosovo Democratic League (led by Ibrahim Rugova) in the 1990s.

Intergenerational trauma: The passing down of emotional and psychological effects of war and violence from one generation to the next.

Selective memory: The practice of remembering only certain narratives of the past, often for political or nationalistic purposes.