It was a sunny, albeit sultry, summer afternoon when I got off the bus in Skenderaj, a small city in the heart of Kosovo. Valon, my translator and guide, picked me up from the bus station and took me the short distance to the diner where my interviewees, former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), had agreed to meet me. I am in the middle of my fourth interview, and as I listen to Artan’s1 vivid story of attempting to take his wife past the former Yugoslavia’s borders to Austria for an important medical treatment, the diner buzzes around us – families chatter, children laugh, and loud music blares from the speakers.
Suddenly, Artan’s serious face registers a flicker of emotion. He explains to us how, in spite of paying a large sum to a travel agency, he was betrayed and was caught by the Serbian police at the border to Hungary. “It was very hard situation”, Valon translates. “Because when we were caught, the policeman said, ‘Look at your daughter. This is the last time you will see her. You will never see her again.’ It was very hard. My daughter was ten years old at the time.” Artan was imprisoned for two years for his activities as part of the KLA and was released only in 2000 after the war ended.
Artan’s story is among many I heard over the months I was in Kosovo, each contributing to the collective narrative of the Kosovo War that began in the mid-1990s and lasted till 1999, a war that reshaped the lives of countless families and defined a generation. Ethnic Albanians were systemically oppressed by the Serbian State led by Slobodan Milošević beginning in the late 1980s. Around 1996, they rose in insurgency, led primarily by the KLA, an armed group formed by the coming together of various smaller resistance groups.2 The narratives I explore in this article help me understand why collective violence against the State was not just a choice of hundreds of Albanians but an imperative. In the following, I delve into human stories – stories of resilience, loss, abuse, and the will for freedom – to give the reader a sense of what drove the combatants in the group, how they justify their actions today, and most importantly, how they were driven to the point of not having an alternative.
Mistreatment
Besnik hails from a village on the northern outskirts of the capital, Pristina. In 1995, a set of Serb policemen entered his house and started demanding that his father hand over his guns. When the bewildered father kept asserting that he did not keep guns, the policemen started beating him up and demanding that he turn out the guns that they kept insisting he had. They assaulted him until his left hand got fractured and his head started bleeding, and then they turned on his sister and struck her, too. Then, leaving the bleeding man on the floor, they left. Besnik’s family could only get medical supplies from around the village since, in his words, “it was dangerous to take him to the hospital.” He had to be treated in the house for close to eight weeks until he recovered. My translator in Pristina, Leona, appears visibly shaken as Besnik finishes this anecdote.
Starting from the revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989, the Serbian state, in conjunction with parts of the ethnic Serb population in Kosovo, implemented a continuous campaign of intimidation and violence against the Kosovar Albanians. Incidents like the above were not isolated, sporadic events; rather, every respondent reported some form of abuse that they or their family had faced during this time. Evidently, the goal of the Serbian apparatus, having witnessed similar events in Bosnia in the recent past, was not just to be punitive but to eradicate all semblance of resistance and claims for independence.
Common themes emerge from the interviews. A pervasive aspect of this intimidation across regions was the frequent stop-and-searches by the predominantly Serb police, which often led to physical assault. Dritan tells me, “It was totally powerless. And when you go, the police stops you, takes you behind the building, beats you up without any reason, and you have nothing [you can] do.” In places like Kaçanik i Vjetër and Ferizaj, stringent curfews were in place for Albanians, greatly limiting gatherings and political discussions.
Another oft-cited aspect is the frequent injustices faced by men conscripted into the Yugoslav army. Many recounted incidents involving humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, and even being framed for crimes committed by other ethnic groups within the army. Endrit describes his uncle’s experiences, saying, “Twice they tried to kill him when he was in the army. So now, after this case, nobody from his family wanted to go or join and just wanted a way to escape.” Unfortunately, this was only part of the broad systemic injustices that Kosovar Albanians faced. Beyond the military, Albanians were also removed from education, employment, and other public institutions – a deliberate effort to exclude them from Kosovar society.
Exclusion from Institutions
In 1995, Hasan went with his father to Pristina to submit his application for the Law faculty at Pristina University. On the way, their bus was stopped by Serbian police, and every passenger’s identity was checked. Their contents were searched without any reason being given. When Hasan’s application for University was found, the Police dragged him and his father to the police station and started striking them for attempting to join the University. “They beat us with wooden sticks, plastic sticks, putting the hand in the wall and after six hours, father told them, ‘If you want to kill us, kill us because it has been six hours you are beating us,’” says Diell, who was translating in Ferizaj.
One of the harsher measures taken by the then-Yugoslav state to oppress the Kosovar Albanian population was to systematically bar them from almost all public services, including public sector jobs, all levels of education, and even healthcare. This policy had devastating consequences: unemployment soared, children and youth were left with no schools to attend, and the Albanian language was widely banned across Kosovo.
Endrit’s elder sister was an excellent student in primary school, and in his words, translated by Blerta, “they couldn’t deny her the graduating degree, but in her diploma, it’s written that this student is not allowed to continue school.” Despite this, she would then become a prominent activist for the Kosovar Albanians and was a major inspiration for Endrit to start resisting. Upon being excluded from these vital institutions, Albanians started setting up their own parallel schools and clinics within houses and shops, and importantly, in secrecy. The punishment upon getting caught, though, was severe. Endrit’s younger brother was on his way home from a class at one of these homeschools when he was stopped and searched by the police. He tried to make up a lie as to where he was going, but the Police found his Albanian textbook and notes in his bag and dragged him to the police station. There, the usual abuse followed, and since Endrit himself was on their watchlist, he was interrogated more harshly. “They kept him in the station for two days in a cell with his hands cuffed, and every shift, a new policeman would come and hit him,” Blerta translates. Looking back, Endrit, who was working in Germany at this time, recounts this as a significant moment that pushed him towards coming back to Kosovo and doing his part in liberating the country. The prevalence of these conditions had pushed the ethnic Albanians to the brink, and Kosovo had become a tinderbox waiting for the spark, a spark that came in March 1998.
Leadership and Martyrdom
On 5th March 1998, the Serbian police launched a full-scale attack on the countryside house of Adem Jashari and his family in Prekaz. As one of the early commanders of the KLA, Jashari had led attacks on Serbian police patrols, prompting the Serbs to mount a so-called revenge mission. According to independent observers, this operation was “not intended to apprehend armed Albanians but to eliminate the suspects and their families.”3 After a two-hour deadline to surrender passed, Serbian artillery shelled the house for two days, exchanging fire with the few KLA members inside. When the smoke cleared, “an estimated fifty-eight Albanians were killed in the attack, including eighteen women and ten children under the age of sixteen, and then summarily buried by the police before autopsies could be performed.”4 Jashari’s family was all but wiped out, save for his niece, Besarte. The massacre drew international condemnation and became a rallying cry for Albanians, immortalizing Jashari as a symbol of resistance—a legacy evident in my interviews 26 years later.
The city of Skenderaj, being a 10-minute drive from Prekaz, has a strong resonance with the event. When I ask Fisnik, my first interviewee there, if he would have participated in the war without Adem Jashari, he replies, “That question is really hard. [N]o one can imagine something happening without the part of that movement. The freedom, the key of Kosovo, and the key of everything is Adem Jasheri. [Without him], I don’t know who would be the person that will be like this, surely not me.” The next person I talked to is Ilir, a member of the current municipal government. He says, “The main thing for the liberation was Jasheri, no one else,” and rates him as a bigger influence than even his cousin, who was instrumental in setting up the home protection units, which were a precursor to the KLA.
The next day, another interview partner, Arben, from a nearby village, gives an interesting insight: “Serbia, former Yugoslavia, always thought for heroes, Albanian heroes, that if we kill the commander, we are going to seize the movement. But always, from that moment it happened, the contrary, it was a boomerang because people joined [the KLA] much more.” He continues with something that clearly reflected much of what the Albanian people thought at the time: “If Jashari could give his life and his whole family for the country, what else do we have to think about, to wait for?”
Adem Jashari was not the only martyr who inspired action. Zahir Pajaziti was another early commander in the KLA, hailing like Edon, one of my earlier interviewees, from a village in the Podujeva municipality. Edon says, and Leona translates, “He [Pajaziti] is the hero; he is the first commandant of KLA. We were neighbors; we were raised together. I worked with his brother in the school, and we were in operations together. When he and his friends were murdered, it was perhaps the single biggest motivation for me to take up arms.”
While individual grievances undoubtedly played a big role in people justifying their participation, the actions and perceived sacrifice of leaders provided a unifying force—a shared sense of purpose and identity.
Last resort, no alternative
In spite of the fame and awe that Adem Jasheri commands in Kosovo, the title ‘Father of the Nation’ is usually endowed upon someone else: Ibrahim Rugova, the first President of the country, who led Kosovo’s shadow government. He founded Kosovo’s oldest political party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), and championed a non-violent struggle for freedom in the early 1990s, relying on international attention and diplomacy to regain Kosovo’s autonomy within Yugoslavia (later Serbia and Montenegro). Unfortunately, Kosovo remained off the radar of Europe and NATO, and its omission in the Dayton Agreement in 1995 signalled to Albanians that peaceful independence was increasingly unfeasible.
When asked about how their family members reacted when they knew of the decision to join the KLA, most interviewees recollected that while the family was highly apprehensive, they never tried to stop them, as it was evident to them that war was the only way to independence. Valon translates for another interviewee, Agron, also in Skenderaj: “Our idea was that we don’t need to do any more politics. The politics game is over. They want to destroy all of us, to clean everything. So we have to do something different, […] to take other actions.”
Even when they did not refer to LDK’s strategy, I could hear a sense of finality when they were recounting the situation in the mid-90s. All the abuse and the suppression of rights and freedom rendered war the only viable option for a life of dignity and normalcy. According to Liridon, back in Ferizaj, “the situation was hard because the life was not normal […]. For example, you couldn’t see a lot of youngsters here because they didn’t dare even to get out. The situation was very hard because a lot of people, including my brother, who was around my age, were forced to leave the country to go abroad. And you could smell […] that something is going to happen because life cannot go like this.”
Most former combatants I interviewed didn’t portray a sense of ambiguity about their participation in the war. In a region with a history of charged national sentimentality, a decade of Serbian oppression under Milošević was more than sufficient to push the ethnic Albanians to the foregone finality of war. When NATO started bombing Belgrade in 1999, Bekim joined flocks of people fleeing Pristina to Macedonia in fear of reprisals from the Serbs. He describes the situation once they were processed by Humanitarian organizations in Macedonia. “We had the chance to go to the United States and other countries. I had the chance to go [to] another country and live my life. But I chose death, to join the war.”
Conclusion
The stories I heard across Kosovo were more than just tales of personal suffering, but they weave a picture of broader injustice. Each act of violence, each barrier to education or dignity, added weight to the growing sense that the Kosovar Albanians had been written out of their own lives. Mistreatment was not occasional — it was routine. Exclusion wasn’t accidental — it was systemic. And eventually, the idea that politics or negotiation could still hold meaning gave way to war, which many described as the only remaining path.
Beneath these choices lay a longstanding desire for independence — a goal that had persisted through decades of frustration and failed negotiations. For those I spoke to, taking up arms was not just about responding to immediate threats, but about finally reclaiming control over their future.
1 All names have been changed in the article to protect the identity of the people I interviewed.
2 Duclos, N. (2020). Joining the Kosovo Liberation Army: A continuist, process-based analysis. Violence: An International Journal, 1(1), 21–39.
3 Krieger, H. (2001). The Kosovo conflict and international law: An analytical documentation, 1974-1999. Cambridge university press.
4 Humanitarian law violations in kosovo. (n.d.). Retrieved March 1, 2025, from https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/kosovo/Kos9810-04.htm
This article was primarily inspired by my conversations with former combatants of the Kosovo Liberation Army as part of my PhD fieldwork. I owe a large debt not only to them for agreeing to speak to me but also to the translators and guides who helped set up a lot of interviews and familiarise me with the relevant context. Although the main focus of the interviews was to understand the social relations that facilitated their joining the KLA, there was also a lot of discussion about the circumstances that led them to do so. I am happy that I can also use this article to voice these parts of my conversations.