I was born in the waning years of the longest period of peace Kosova had known for centuries. My childhood was one of blissful content, unaware of the changes soon to come. I was fortunate to have a loving family and a lot of friends from many different ethnic backgrounds: Albanians, Bosnians, Serbians and Turkish children all lived in my neighborhood. We went to school together, played together and competed against each other in sports and activities. Kosova was an anonymous and autonomous little province in the Republic of Yugoslavia, unfamiliar to many people not living in the Balkans. I lived through the time when Kosova became the focus of the world’s attention due to the genocidal madness of Slobodan Milosevic. The attention of the media has long ago shifted to other troubled spots, but the memory of that conflict is still fresh in the minds of other Kosovars and me.

Brief History of Yugoslavia

 Yugoslavia had been formed from of an alliance of various Balkan republics in 1918. The original Yugoslavia was dismantled after the Germans invaded in 1941 and then reformed at the end of World War II under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito in 1945. Each of the six republics and both autonomous provinces in Yugoslavia had a seat on the federal presidency. Each state and province had a considerable amount of autonomy in local affairs, but answered to the federal government for national decisions. It was an arrangement comparable to the structure of the United States with each State having its own governor and legislature making state-level decisions.

Tito was praised by many for his heroics against the Germans during WW II. His politics as the leader of Yugoslavia will always be debatable, but one belief he was widely commended for was his personal belief that everyone should be treated equally. Yugoslavia’s population was composed of Serbians, Croatians, Bosnians, Turks, Albanians, Macedonians, Slovenians and others. There were as many religions as there were ethnicities. It was a European melting pot, but the "ingredients" did not always mix well together.

Tito tried to enforce his belief in equality through official policy. It didn’t always happen the way he envisioned, but at least he made an effort to overcome ethnic and religious tension festered in the Yugoslavian territories. He didn’t try to make everyone get along, but was clearly opposed to ethnic hatred. This enforced tolerance came at a price of course; there were restrictions on speech and the media. History and even geography was rewritten to suit the philosophy of the government: For example, the existence of Albania, Yugoslavia’s neighbor to the south, was never mentioned in history, geography or literature. Dissent against the government was not tolerated.

People accepted these restrictions and Tito remained the unchallenged President of Yugoslavia for over 3 decades. Like most dictators, his government was based on the strength of his personality. It all began to unravel in 1980 when he died and the ancient ethnic hatreds and animosities began to creep back into Yugoslavian society.

Family Background and life style before war

I was born in Mitrovica, Kosova. Mitrovica is a city that I will always love. Three rivers cross through the city and the remains of a medieval fortress are found on the outskirts of Mitrovica. When I was growing up there, Mitrovica was a modern city with its own professional basketball and soccer clubs, a popular university, and a vibrant nightlife. Most of the modern Albanian rock bands in Kosova came from Mitrovica, putting the city on the cutting edge of cool.

My father, Aziz Emin Shabani, was born in 1945 in Mikushnica village, municipality of Skenderaj, a small town 20 miles south of Mitrovica. My father had never been to school. He learned to read and write on his own with the help of his relatives. Later, he got a diploma that would be the equivalent of a GED. He came from a family with four brothers and three sisters. My uncle Musa was the only one from that family who graduated from High School and went to college. That would not have happened if not for my father tricking their father into sending uncle Musa to school.

The men of my father’s family supported themselves by farming and working the odd construction job and my grandfather did not see the need for his sons to waste their time in school. Moreover, he was completely prejudiced against the Serbians and they ran the schools, made up the majority of the teaching faculty, and the lessons were all taught in the Serbian language. Grandfather Emin felt his sons would be unduly influenced by the Serbians if they went to their institutions. Uncle Musa wanted to go to college to study electronics but knew my grandfather would not approve and his signature was required on the college application. So my father took the paperwork to grandfather and told him it was an application to get a birth certificate. My grandfather could not read or write Serbian, so he signed the form. It was a trick my father and uncle Musa laughed about later, but when my grandfather found out about it, he was furious and they both avoided him for several weeks.

I never liked my grandfather Emin. He was nicer to strangers than he was to his own family. He was a very traditional man who lived his life according to the longstanding customs and traditions of the countryside. He showed no love toward his children or his grandchildren and viewed all women as second class citizens. One time I saw him beating my grandmother Adile because she didn’t wash his socks. When one of his daughters became pregnant out of wedlock he beat her so badly she lost the baby and was never able to conceive again. He didn’t allow her to marry the man she loved and forced her into a marriage with somebody she didn’t know. He threatened my sister and me if we wore shorts or skirts around him.

My father ran away from home when he was 16 years old and went to Slovenia. He didn’t like the life style of my grandfather’s village and disagreed with the house rules set by his family. When he went to Slovenia he took classes and became certified as builder. He learned the Slovenian language and later he went to work in Croatia and learned the Croatian language as well. He lived in Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro, until he went back to Kosova in 1967. He went back because his mother and his oldest brother were very sick and he knew his father would not lift a finger to care for them.

This was also the year my father had to serve his mandatory military service and the year he met and got engaged to my mother. Yugoslavia required all men serve in the military for two years. The Kosova Albanian soldiers were generally treated very poorly in the Yugoslavian army. They were given all the menial and dangerous jobs and there was very little chance for advancement. Around this time, Kosova Albanians had been demonstrating to be given the status of a republic (rather than a province) and equal rights in the Yugoslavian Federation. Their demands to have schools in their native language, more representation in the Parliament and a state flag were eventually met, but there were residual hard feelings and the Kosova Albanian soldiers bore the brunt of the Serbian officer’s displeasure.

My father put up with the military for 2 months before deciding he’d had enough. He became progressively "deafer" after a training exercise where an explosion went off close to where he was standing. They made him go through a lot of tests but I guess he was a better actor than they were testers, and he was finally released after nine months. His "selective hearing" is still a problem today particularly when my mother wants him to take out the trash or run an errand.

My mother Shkukrije Rrustemi Shabani was born in 1955 in the village of Reznik about 40 minutes east of Mitrovica. She went to primary and middle school but dropped out of high school in her 2^nd year when she married my father. At that time education was a low priority especially for women, who were considered odd if not married by the time they were 20, and married women did not go to school. My mother had two brothers and two sisters; all of them finished high school and my aunt even went to college.

My grandma Hata was a very traditional countrywoman. She was very religious and she lived her life based on the Koran. Despite her conservative nature, she was the kindest woman in the world and everybody adored her. My mother’s father, Syla, was one of the funniest men I ever met. In contrast to my grandfather on my father’s side, he was liberal, fair-minded and everybody loved him. Tales of grandpa Syla’s exploits are still told during family gatherings to this day. For example, Grandpa Syla worked in the dangerous Trepca mines and as a result wound up having to spend a lot of time in the hospital. Knowing how terribly afraid most of the nurses were of dogs, he snuck a mangy stray dog into the recovery wing. The nursing staff evacuated the building till somebody could catch the dog and throw it out. During another hospital stay he and another friend dressed in sheets and pretended to be ghosts; the superstitious patients fled their beds, gowns flapping and dragging IVs behind them.

Grandpa Syla worked in the Trepca mines pulling gold, iron lead, zinc and other precious metals from the bowels of the mountains. Trepca was vitally important to Yugoslavia’s economy, particularly for the gold that was mined there. The first day on the job his friends were given odd looking, thigh-length rubber miner boots before going down in the shaft. Syla’s friends, new to the job, didn’t know what they were for. He cheerfully told them they were for storing their pickaxes when they were finished for the day. They used these "axe holsters" for a week before a supervisor noticed this odd behavior and showed the poor men how the boots were supposed to be used.

During one of his many visits to the Trepca mines President Tito asked the miners if there was anything they needed. Grandpa Syla immediately told the President that he needed a new set of dentures. He added that, since they’d recovered so much gold from the mine for the President, maybe he would let him have a set of 24 carat teeth. Tito laughed and told him that wouldn’t be possible, so Grandpa Syla asked him if he’d just let him eat a few nuggets and maybe he could grow his own.

During summer breaks we spent a lot of time with my mother’s family. We all gathered around Grandpa Syla and he told us funny stories for hours until we fell asleep. He was one of the most important adults in my life. Very liberal-minded, he hated the secondary role women were relegated to in our society and that had a big influence on me. I grew up to be an independent, modern woman in large part thanks to the ideas and beliefs he and my parents passed on to me.

Grandpa Syla died in March 24, 1985, the day before my brother Emin’s birthday. Emin was only 2 years old and didn’t understand why grandpa wasn’t coming to his birthday party. We went to my mother’s family and when Emin saw all the people there, he thought there was a surprise birthday party for him. We went inside and touched grandpa’s hands and said goodbye. Even at 2, Emin had learned grandpa was a big joker, and thought he was just playing some kind of new game. He was so little and cute and the way he talked to grandpa, telling him to stop pretending he was asleep, it made everybody even more sad.

My parents met in 1967 and were engaged within a year. They met through one of my mother’s aunts who lived in my father’s village. My parents had to keep their relationship secret because dating before marriage was taboo and most of the marriages were arranged by the parents. That was one of the many customs my father did not agree with and proved to be another issue his father turned into a lifelong grudge.

My parents planned to get married in 1968, but those plans were interrupted when my father was drafted into the Yugoslavian army. When he got out of the army, he was ready to get married right away but my grandma, Hata, from my mother’s side wanted them to have a large, traditional wedding. Weddings in Kosova then, as they are now, were big affairs with hundreds of guests and wedding related events spread over five days or more. The custom was for the groom to shower the bride with new clothes, bedroom furniture and especially gold jewelry. The jewelry was particularly emphasized because, according to ancient law, if there was a divorce the woman could only leave the house with what she could carry. In many rural parts of Kosova this remains essentially the law of the land.

My father could not afford the lavish wedding his fiancée’s family insisted on. He returned to Slovenia and worked construction jobs until 1970. He finally saved enough money and they were married in August 1971. The families had their way in conducting my parents wedding. My parents didn’t agree with most of the "traditions" they were instructed to follow, but they’d passed the point of no return in agreeing to give into the demands of the families. For example, my father’s family got together and picked up the bride in a horse drawn carriage. Romantic though this may sound, it wasn’t very pleasant for my mother who was terribly afraid of horses. Along the route the celebrants fired weapons in the air ("happy fire" as they call it), and my mother also hated guns. The day after the wedding, my father’s entire family came to her home and she had to serve coffee and tea. They all watched her closely to make sure she served the drinks in the proper traditional manner--if she hadn’t then they would have called her a bad bride. Happily, my mother passed that test. However, she earned the indignation of the family later that afternoon when her new sister-in-law told her to go help stack hay in her good white clothes. Complete obedience to the husband’s family was another "tradition" but my mother drew the line there. Such a seemingly simple matter became a family scandal that lasted for decades.

My parents moved to Mitrovica the next day. My father had built a little one-room house. The bedroom doubled as the living room and there was a small kitchen and tiny bath. A bigger house had already been started but because they spent so much on the wedding, they hadn’t been able to finish it. My father wanted to stay in Kosova with my mother but he had a hard time finding steady construction work during the winter. Eventually, he started going back to Croatia during the winter months to make enough money to finish their new dream home. It took 6 years for them to get the house to the point where they could move in, and another 2 years before it was completely finished. They build the house entirely by hand, and they were both immensely proud of their work.

I was born five years after my parents were married. As a testament to the good common sense of my parents, they waited to have children till they could give them a roof over their heads and provide for them. Two years later my sister Shkurta was born. They wanted to have another baby but my mother couldn’t get pregnant again. Some members of the family started to pressure my father to marry another woman because she wasn’t getting pregnant and had not provided the family with a son. Polygamy was not unheard of in Kosova at that time and even now in the rural areas it is still openly practiced. I remember once my grandmother Adile came to visit my mother and they had a huge argument about bringing another woman into the marriage. My mother left the room in tears, slamming the door behind her. When my father came home he found out about this encounter and was furious at his mother. He took my mother aside and told her that he loved her, that he would never do that to her and that he was perfectly happy with the two girls. This was one of the earliest memories I have of seeing how much my parents loved each other and how proud I was of both of them to stand up for what was right.

Five years after Shkurta was born my brother Emin made his grand appearance into the world. The event was celebrated by the extended family for the arrival of the newest member and privately by my parents because the in-laws finally stopped pestering my father to take another wife. However, they were still not entirely through with trying to meddle in my parent’s affairs. Grandfather Emin insisted that they name the new child after him. Often parents named their kids after their own parents, particularly those who had passed away. My grandfather, in a rare moment of personal candor, admitted he was afraid that none of his sons would want to name their kids after him because he was so reviled. (This was the man who once threw a piece of firewood at my father when he was a boy because he dared look longingly at a glass of chocolate milk my grandfather was drinking). Pressure started coming from all my father’s brothers and sisters, who did not want to name their children after their father. My mother and father finally relented and prayed frequently that the only thing their son would inherit from his ill-spirited grandfather was his name.

When they came home with their new son there was a small naming ceremony. Much to my surprise, my grandfather actually thanked my parents for agreeing to name the baby after him. That was the only time in my entire life that I saw him happy, smiling and grateful.

I was in my 1^st grade class when I learned that I had a brother. While I was excited and happy to meet the new baby, I didn’t want to leave the school early. I loved my school and my friends. The school was called 25 May and it was named in honor of President Tito’s birthday. It was a brand new school with two big floors and beautiful landscaped gardens. I fell in love with my school on the first day of classes. The school was always in the top 10 of the best schools in all of Yugoslavia. My first teacher was Mrs. Zarife Pllana. She was a very nice woman and a great teacher. I loved her so much that once I called her "mom" by accident. She laughed and told me not to worry because I was like a daughter to her. I didn’t want my mother to know what I’d said, but I felt guilty and told her about the incident anyway and apologized to her in case I’d hurt her feelings. Happily, my mother did not get mad at me.

Mrs. Pllana was a widow in her mid forties and had three children. She was one of the very few women in Mitrovica that owned and drove a car, something I always admired. One time I asked her if she would teach me to drive, but I was only 10 years old at the time and she said I would have to wait a few more years. Mrs. Pllana and my mother were early influences in my life and they were good role models. There were not many strong, independent women in Kosova at that time, but fortunately I had the two of them to look up to.

Mrs. Pllana was my teacher for four years until I started middle school, which was in the same building as my elementary school. My best friends in primary school were Monika, my cousin Valbona who lived next door and Majlinda who lived couple of blocks away. I had something in common with every one of them. Monika was very good at poetry recital. We went to the literature club together and had a poetry exhibit and a lot of our poems were published in a local children’s magazine called Pioneer. Valbona had a very good voice and we attended choir practice together. I played basketball with Majlinda and I always admired her drawing skills. She had a painting and drawing exhibit in school when we were in the third grade. Majlinda and I were also part of the Serbian Spelling Competition when we were in the fourth grade. It was just the two of us representing our school at the city level competition. Her Serbian vocabulary was excellent and I was very good in Serbian grammar. At the end of the competition we’d taken second place and our teachers were very proud of us.

I began studying English in the 5^th Grade. It was a mandatory subject for all students starting middle school that year. Again, I was fortunate to have a very good teacher. She believed in language immersion and spoke only English during the entire class period. In 6^th Grade, I was in an English comprehension competition with about 50 other students, the majority of them much older than me. I was nervous and didn’t think I was going to do very well, but wound up placing First. It was a great feeling and really motivated me to continue to study English.

My life outside of school was also good. My mother worked at a clothing factory that made many of the fashionable clothes worn by everyone in Yugoslavia. My father was employed as a foreman at a local government-run construction company that had numerous projects throughout Kosova. One of the things I remembered most about my neighborhood was how people respected each other even though they were from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. For example, Bajram is a Muslim holiday of feasting and the Muslim Albanians and Turks shared their traditional foods with their Christian Serbian and Bosnian. Baklava, a sweet honey-and-nut pastry, was a much anticipated dessert for everyone, particularly the Serbian families, during Bajram. The Bosnian children had a Bajram tradition where they would go door to door wishing everyone a happy Bajram and in return would receive treats. During Easter celebrations, it was the Serbian’s turn to share their food, One treat my friends and I always looked forward to at Easter were the colored eggs that the Serbians gave out to the children of the families they were sociable with.

During this time, people also respected one another and were sympathetic to each other’s cultures. For example, many Albanians enjoyed meat from water buffalo, which was raised in certain parts of the country, but they never offered it to Serbians who were prohibited by their beliefs from eating this meat. Similarly, if Serbians were offering Muslim Kosovars food, they never offered pork, the consumption of that meat forbidden by the followers of Islam. We knew each other’s traditional dances and when attending multi-ethnic celebrations such as weddings and birthday parties, could dance in either the Serbian or Albanian style.

Of course life was not perfect, but it was good. When I switched all my classmates shoes around while everyone was in gym class in the 5^th grade, I was not a "horrible Albanian brat" but just the mischievous granddaughter of Syla Rrustemi, who was famous for playing such tricks. When I snuck into my Bosnian neighbor’s yard and stole plums it was not "that bad Albanian" who was up to no good, but just a naughty little girl who was going to get in real trouble when her parents got home. The neighbor that caught me stealing actually brought me basket of plums the next day. When I asked her why she’d been so upset before, she said she was just mad because I was stealing: she was trying to teach me a lesson and said all I needed to do was ask. Little could I have known that these good relations would be coming to a swift and unpleasant end with the imminent rise of Slobodan Milosevic.

By the time I started 8^th Grade the political situation in Kosova started to change dramatically for the worse. On June 28, 1989 a minor Serbian politician named Slobodan Milosevic made a speech at a massive rally attended by more than half a million Serbs near Pristina, the capital of Kosova. At the time, Milosevic was one of the many members of Parliament running for President of Serbia. He started using ethnic tensions and hatreds to propel himself up the political ladder. He denounced the Albanians as the cause of all the evils in Yugoslavia and said as President his first act would be to rescind the autonomy of Kosova and institute military law in the province.

Milosevic was elected Serbian President later that year and things started to change around the neighborhood. My Serbian neighbors all attended the June rally and were big supporters of Milosevic. They started acting differently towards us, avoiding us socially, playing anti-Albanian songs loudly at all times of the day and night and most ominously arming themselves with weapons given out by the Serbian government. Milosevic had repeated over and over how dangerous Albanians were and it seemed our neighbors took his words to heart.

The Albanian police were the first to lose their jobs. Milosevic passed laws that discriminated against Albanians, prohibiting the display of the Albanian flag, closing Albanian run media and targeting members of Albanian political parties for arrest. The Albanian police naturally refused to enforce these laws and they were terminated en masse.

My parents were horrified and scared. For the first time we started locking our front doors and gates. We lived quietly so as not to attract attention to ourselves. They met with other family members to discuss what was going on, but could not resolve how to resist these detrimental changes. My sister and I weren’t allowed to play out of sight of the house; my brother was not even allowed to leave the yard. I missed my friends, though sometimes we still found ways to get together. My Serbian friends would tell me what their parents were up to and were equally perplexed by the drastic changes going on around them.

Milosevic made good on his other promises as well. More and more Albanians were fired from their jobs, their schools were closed, their access to state-run health care was cut off, and they lost administrative control of the province. My father’s construction company collapsed and my my mother lost her job at the clothing factory. The Serbs had closed all the schools teaching in Albanian. Rather than give in to Serbian oppression, Kosova Albanians under Dr. Ibrahim Rrugova established their own schools, healthcare facilities and local government. It was a surprising and risky move, opposed at every level by the official government, but thanks in large part to money sent into Kosova from abroad, this parallel government was successful.

At the start of High School in 1990 I wanted to study telecommunications and computers. However, the underground Albanian schools for those subjects had been moved away from Mitrovica because of safety concerns. It was too dangerous for me to travel back and forth to the new location, and I couldn’t afford a place to stay in near the Telecommunications school. My second choice was nursing school, which was being taught in Mitrovica. This made my parents happy because they always wanted to have a nurse or a doctor in the family.

My first problem getting into nursing school was that I didn’t know where to submit my application. The Albanian shadow government had established the school but I didn’t know where it was. There was no pubic information about the school: it was too dangerous to report the locations because the Serbians considered the Albanian schools illegal and moved in to shut them down wherever they uncovered them.

Eventually, I decided to go to the regular medical high school, hoping to hear something about the underground Albanian school. I had to cross a bridge spanning the Iber River to get to the school. The bridge was being monitored by a Serbian police officer who detained me before crossing. Like most of their police officers, he was massive (the Serbian police had Napoleonic height and weight requirements for all their officers, the general theory was the bigger the better). He wore a navy blue uniform with combat boots and was armed with a pistol, a machine gun, a 3-foot baton and a couple of hand grenades. Very few Kosova Albanians in their right minds came within 100 yards of a Serbian police officer, but he was standing right in the way of where I needed to go.

"Where in the world do you think you are going?" he asked me. I told him I was going to submit my application for the new school year.

"Your Serbian language is very good and you must to be a brave girl to come here and want to study in the Serbian language," he sneered.

"I don’t think I am being brave because I am not going to study in the Serbian language," I boldly told him. The policeman’s face turned bright red and he gave me a look of pure spite.

"Get the hell out of here, you stupid Albanian, you will never come to this school if you don’t want to study in Serbian," he yelled at me. He frightened me so badly I just wanted to walk away but he grabbed me by my shoulder and shouted in my face.

"Listen you stupid little bitch," he said. "Make sure you tell everybody not to come here unless they want to study in Serbian!"

My whole body was shaking. I hated being afraid and I hated even more showing this man I was scared. I was also kicking myself mentally for being so stupid. Why did I have to provoke this policeman? The police beat Albanians senseless every day for little or no reason and I’d just given the policeman a perfect excuse to send me to the hospital.

Trying to regain my composure and at the same time get out of this dangerous situation, I told him I would pass his message along to anyone who would listen. I asked him as kindly as possible to let me go. He pushed me away so hard I fell down. As I got to my feet and walked away, I prayed he would leave me alone and not shoot me in the back.

An older man had been watching the whole incident from a safe distance and approached me when I was well away from the Serbian policeman.

"Are you all right? Where were you trying to go?" he asked.

"I guess I am all right now that I am away from him," I said tearfully and I told him what happened. I was just glad to be speaking to a fellow Albanian and especially one that seemed kind.

"You shouldn’t provoke the Serbian police like that, young lady" the man told me. "But it is fortunate I met you here. You see, I am an Albanian teacher and I am going to help you. We are starting an Albanian school in a new location. We have good professors, a basic teaching program and it is in a safe place so you don’t have to worry."

I was so relieved I couldn’t thank him enough. He escorted me to the registration center in a nearby elementary school where I submitted my application and all my other documents. I was told I had to take a placement test in two hours with another group of prospective students.

While I was waiting, three Serbian police vans and twice as many police cars rolled up to the front of the building. Almost a dozen uniformed police officers leapt out and ran towards the building, some even more heavily armed than the one I’d met a few hours earlier on the bridge. They kicked in the front door and charged inside, shouting for everyone to not move. The police demanded all the paperwork and documents. When the instructors didn’t respond fast enough to satisfy them, the beatings began. Two officers grabbed a teacher and slammed him against the floor. Bleeding from his head, they dragged him out to one of the vans. I could see his arm was clearly broken and he was in tremendous pain, but the police continued to hit him with their fists and batons.

Nobody was trying to fight the police; everyone knew if you showed any resistance they might put a bullet in you. The only thing you could do was to try to escape or hide. Some of the officers started to set fire to the desks and cabinets that had all our ID’s, diplomas and other paperwork. They went around the building grabbing whoever they could find, arresting some and simply beating others. I saw them chase a 15 year old boy through the building. I later learned he jumped out of a 2^nd floor window trying to escape and broke his arm in 3 places.

The police were blocking all the exits, so I had no choice but to hide. I ran away and hid in the bathroom and locked the door. I could hear the other students and teachers crying in pain. The police simply continued to beat and curse them. The building started to fill up with smoke from the fires and I started to worry that I might be trapped and burned to death. I opened a window in the bathroom that was too small to crawl out of, but at least I could breathe. By some stroke of good fortune, the police never checked inside the bathroom, though I could hear their heavy footsteps outside the door.

The raid lasted about a half an hour. The police vehicles left with five teachers and a school secretary under arrest. People emerged from hiding places to help the wounded. I found a bucket in the bathroom and starting pouring water on the fires still burning in the building. Others joined in and we were able to keep the building from burning up. The floors became slippery with a mixture of blood, water and ashes. We were all afraid that the Serbian police would come back, but we wanted to try to save what we could. The teachers who were left announced the registration center would have to be closed till they could figure out what to do next.

The next day I got a phone call from an administrator at the school; incredibly they were still going to try to continue with the registration process and in the same building that had been raided the day before. I felt I had been lucky to survive the first attack unharmed and was not certain I wanted to try my luck again. The administrator was in good spirits, especially considering what had just happened, and told me that the Serbian police mentality was that once they’d taught the Albanians a lesson in one place, they didn’t think they would need to teach the lesson again.

The administrator told me the original documents I’d previously submitted had been taken away or destroyed by the police and to come with duplicates. (By an amazing stroke of luck, the originals were found in a municipality building 11 years later). My parents and I had another discussion about the future of my education. It was not a question of whether I would continue my studies or not: Both my parents believed an education was important to my future. It was now simply a matter of where I would be studying: whether I should go to the Serbian schools which would be safer, though it would seem like a betrayal to the Albanian community, or to attend the Albanian schools, which was more patriotic, but quite a bit more dangerous.

The Albanian shadow government had not given up on the idea of having Albanian-taught classes in the regular school buildings. Prior to Milosevic coming to power, Albanians, Serbians and the other ethnicities all attended high school and university in the same buildings. Classes were taught in Albanian and Serbian and everyone learned in their native tongue. Serbian and Albanian secondary language classes were mandatory and everyone spoke each other’s language quite well. Milosevic decided classes would no longer be taught in Albanian and Albanians were not allowed to use the same buildings as the Serbian students. This created a huge educational imbalance for obvious reasons: all of the science labs, music conservatories, dormitories, athletic equipment, etc. were inaccessible to the Albanian students under these prejudicial rules.

The day high schools classes were scheduled to begin, peaceful demonstrations were scheduled to be held throughout Kosova protesting the discrimination against Albanian students and asking for them to be allowed equal access to the schools. The demonstrations took place on September 1^st, 1990. In Mitrovica, the Serbian police established checkpoints and specifically blocked the roads leading to all the high schools in the city.

Still teachers, demonstrators, my fellow students and I found our way to the Branko Radiqevic High School where we would have normally attended classes. My mother came with me; we had to detour around the checkpoints and roadblocks and sneak through people’s yards, but we made it along with over a 1,000 other demonstrators. Several people had hand-made signs with slogans like "Schools are for everybody", "Please let us use the schools" and "I have the right to study in my native language." At first, there were some members of the press, international and local, but most of the reporters were eventually chased away by the police. The former school director bravely stood on the stairs leading to the school and began to give a speech denouncing the inequalities the Albanians were facing. The police didn’t let him finish.

We may have slipped through the checkpoints and roadblocks, but the police were still waiting in large numbers at the school. As the protestors gathered more police arrived and they were backed up by riot police the army. All in all there were almost as many police and military as there were protestors. Shortly after the school director began his speech, the police moved in.

They moved in on the demonstrators swinging their batons. At first they targeted the teachers, but then they began beating and arresting everyone they could get close to. I was toward the back of the action watching the events unfold. The demonstrators continued to run and wave their signs and sing out slogans against the government. The police maneuvered around the protestors until they had us encircled--the only escape was across the Iber River to our backs.

A young student holding a sign in front of me was grabbed by Serbian police officers and dragged away. Even though they were beating him, he still managed to throw the sign he was carrying to me. I caught it and took up the chant of the crowd, holding the sign high in the air in defiance of the police. In that moment I felt strong, proud and brave. It felt good and I didn’t want to put the sign down but now I’d become a target for the Serbian police!

A policeman a few feet from me yelled at me to stop. He was wearing a helmet and full riot gear. He pointed his finger at me and beckoned for me to come to him. When I stood my ground, he began walking toward me. I ran, still holding my sign. The policeman chased me, but was slowed by all the equipment he was carrying and I managed stay ahead of him.

The demonstrators continued their protest around me, but suddenly there was a terrible screaming from the Albanians in the front lines. I turned to see what was happening and saw some more police had arrived in a large fire truck and were spraying the demonstrators with water. Somehow, the police had managed to heat the water to boiling and they were scalding everyone they sprayed. There were hundreds of students, professors and parents sprayed by the hot water. Mercifully, the police ran out of boiling water after a short time.

My mother and I had become separated and I was really worried about her. I didn’t know if she’d been burned, arrested, or beaten by the officers. Every time I tried to stop to look for her, the relentless policeman with the helmet would catch up to me and try to grab me.

Next the police changed tactics and began to throw tear gas into the crowd. I was standing near the edge of the Iber River and decided to risk going across. The waters of the Iber come from nearby mountains and it is always cold, even in the late summer. The fast moving water came up over my waist as I walked across still holding my sign over my head. I looked back and saw the policeman with the helmet standing at the water’s edge glaring at me. Happily he did not feel like getting wet that afternoon.

Exhausted, I sat near the river’s edge and watched what was happening on the other side. I had never felt so tired in my life. I was tired of running, from holding the heavy sign above my head, tired of dodging police officers, my throat was burning from the tear gas and the cold water seemed to have sapped the last of my energy. Still, I couldn’t see my mother and my fear for her safety motivated me to get moving again. I waded back across the Iber and into the crowd to try to find her, still carrying that damn sign. The stick the sign was mounted on was huge: the sign itself little bigger than a desktop calendar, but it had become like a good-luck token and I refused to let go of it.

Eventually, I found my mother. She was choking from the tear gas, but had avoided the Serbian batons and handcuffs. We made our way back to the Iber River and encouraged those around us to cross over to escape from the police.

The journey home was long and uncomfortable; our feet made squishing noises the whole way from being soaked in the water. At first we were scared and sad for what happened at the demonstration. Despite the Albanian’s intention for a peaceful protest, the demonstration had turned violent and bloody. Many of my friends and teachers had been badly hurt. The burns from the boiling water would scar many of them for the rest of their lives. I knew that the ones who’d been arrested would be beaten over and over before they were released, if they were ever released. But I was proud that our people had stood up in the face of overwhelming odds and tried to make their voices heard.

As for my "lucky" sign: my mother kept telling me to get rid of it in case we were seen by the police, but I refused. The stick was so heavy I could barely carry it by the time we got home. I gave my father the sign and asked him to remount it on a lighter stick. He made me a smaller wooden pole that folded in half and was much easier to carry.

Despite our exhaustion, my mother and I stayed up to watch the evening news. In every city the demonstrators had been met with excessive police force, and hundreds had been injured or arrested. When the coverage turned to the events in Mitrovica, I was quite startled to see myself on television. There I was holding my sign marching with the other protestors. I never even saw the journalist who had filmed me. The Serbian TV reporter called me "a little Albanian terrorist".

I jumped up from the couch and started pacing around the room. I couldn’t believe they had not reported the cruel beatings, the unlawful arrests and scalding water being used against the peaceful demonstrators. Most of all, I couldn’t believe they were calling me terrorist. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was worried that my parents and I were going to be in trouble with the Serbian police. I felt horrible.

After seeing the brutality of the Serbian police up close, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to the Albanian schools any more.