Music, emotions, and joy in Kosovo’s wartime The concepts of war and joy may seem almost incompatible. On one hand, there are moments of violence, displacement, and trauma, while on the other, there exist joy and positive emotions. However, an individual’s experiences during wartime can be multifaceted, and not every emotion felt during war needs to be negative. In recent […]

Music in the culture of remembrance during times of war in Kosovo Music can serve as significant emotional resource for people and create a sense of community. Moreover, it has the potential to distract from realities and inspire collective enthusiasm. In times of war, alongside its political and military functions, music can assume a central role in portraying normalcy of […]

Imagine that there was a memorial plaque on the wall of the former police station in the regional centre of Bosnia Posavina region. A memorial plaque with an inscription indicating that Bosniaks and Croats from Brčko were tortured in the building, and especially in the room number thirteen. Just because they had different names, some of them were killed at […]

Which events deserve to be commemorated? Who gets to have a statue and why? By Blerta Hoçia You can read part one here. Just as in the official state narrative, even in the non-official one, stories of heroes and war prevail. However, unlike the institutional narrative, the non-official one contains other stories too, spontaneously borne out of need, perhaps to […]

Which events deserve to be commemorated? Who gets to have a statue and why? by Blerta Hoçia For the time being, in Kosovo, some of these questions receive spontaneous and casual answers. There is no museum of memory or any special central level regulatory law on memorialisation to determine the standards and guidelines about memorials. The only institution responsible for maintaining […]

On Friday, I watched my fellow citizens go to Prijedor for a commemoration of victims of the military operation Oluja. Everything was the same as two months ago, when they went to an assembly to support Aleksandar Vučić in Belgrade, which was also organised by the local SNSD and entailed a non-working day and extended weekend, flags of Republika Srpska, […]

Zorica says that Serbs have lived well in the village mixed with Albanians. Up until 1998. At that time, she recalls, the Serbian regime uniformed the skilled Serbs in the villages as military reservists. This act frightened a lot the Albanian neighbors. The two village communities, which had once wished each other well for the feasts, which drank water from […]

After they burned the village where Zoja lived with her husband, two daughters, and two sons, the whole family, after many vicissitudes, finally managed to move to Germany. With the decision of her husband, they returned after the war ended in order to rebuild their burned house and to start their life in Kosovo. They lived a happy life until […]

Born into a poor family with eleven siblings, going abroad, and working hard as a teenager, Sabri, now 61 years old, has experienced a lot in his life. Also, during the war, Sabri had terrible experiences. Sabri joined the KLA and he exchanged fire with the Serbian army while transporting the family on a tractor trailer while going towards the […]

In March 1999, a bomb exploded in the Mitrovica marketplace. Rrahim Hasani’s five-year-old daughter Elizabeta dies on the spot. The other seven-year-old daughter, Elvira, got wounded on both of her legs. Rrahim, now living in Podgorica, remembers the times when he lived and worked happily throughout Kosovo. He is happy that on the memorial plaque of the victims of that […]

Mursel Gashi, a former KLA soldier, and his wife Bahria complement each other in the story they tell about the murder of their minor daughter, Vlora, who was murdered together with her grandmother while they were running away from home in a tractor-trailer during wartime. “When my mother and father died, it felt a great pain, but in time the […]

Mursel and Shehria got married in 1988. A year later they got married, and they got a son. Ironically, the firstborn child of Veliu family was named Gëzim, which means happiness in Albanian language, but he caused them so much sadness and grief. In 1999, while the family was in a column of refugees leaving for Albania a Serb paramilitary […]