Haxhimusa’s two‑storey house sits in Doganaj, a mountain village in southeast Kosovo, with a small front garden of old fruit trees and fields stretching behind. Winter light falls across the façade and the living room is warm. On the table are faded photographs of another era: young men in uniform, barely older than children, their faces solemn. Haxhimusa traces one with his finger. “That was us,” he says softly.
Now 58 and living quietly with his wife Vjollca, daughters Zana and Gresa and son‑in‑law Fisnik, Haxhimusa still carries the memories of the 1990s. He was an ethnic Albanian member of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the guerrilla force that clashed with Serbian police and the Yugoslav Army. His path to the KLA was shaped by earlier encounters with repression: in 1987 he was arrested after telling other ethnic Albanians he did not want to fight them, and was sentenced to five years, serving three in a prison in Foča, then in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
After his release he returned to mechanical engineering studies, worked with Kosovo’s Humanitarian Law Center and spent a year as a refugee in Germany before returning home. The turning point came in March 1998 after the Prekaz massacre northwest of Pristina, when a special Serbian police unit killed 58 people, including local KLA leader Adem Jashari and several relatives. “I cried. After that, there was no other way,” Haxhimusa recalls.
He joined the first volunteers from Nerodime, the area that includes his village. That initial group numbered 35—30 men and five women—many of them barely 20. He remembers having a single Kalashnikov, 90 rounds and two grenades. “Ninety bullets against an entire army,” he says. Over time the volunteers swelled into a force approaching 1,000 fighters, but supplies of food and ammunition remained scarce. He maintains the Yugoslav Army fought against the whole population.
When the fighting ended he stood on a makeshift stage in Ferizaj as crowds surged on rooftops and NATO KFOR soldiers watched. That moment, he says, justified their struggle. Demobilised in September 1999, Haxhimusa worked with Kosovo’s provisional institutions and later served as a city councillor in Ferizaj. On 17 February 2008, when Kosovo declared independence, he took to the streets of Pristina and later celebrated with his family. “There was a lot of euphoria. Our ideal back then was freedom above all. We thought everything would start from scratch again.”
Reality proved more complicated. Building functioning state institutions took far longer than hoped. Nepotism, unemployment and waves of emigration followed. Only in 2024 did Kosovars finally gain visa‑free travel to the EU. Haxhimusa says he feels the EU often tilts toward Serbia in its dialogue with Kosovo. Still, he insists he has no regrets. “Life is hard in Kosovo but we are free,” he says.
But recent events have reopened painful memories. The Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, established in the Netherlands in 2015 under EU pressure, has prosecuted former KLA figures on allegations including persecution, murder, torture and forced disappearances. The court is widely criticised in Kosovo as unjust and even colonial; many people view the prosecutions as an attack on the independence struggle rather than an effort at accountability.
Earlier this February prosecutors asked for 45 years’ imprisonment each for four former KLA leaders—Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi—a combined request of 180 years. For Haxhimusa it felt like the whole history of their fight was on trial. “This court is unjust; it should not exist at all,” he says. “We were defending ourselves back then. The war crimes cases against Ramush Haradinaj, Fatmir Limaj and others were already heard in The Hague, and they were acquitted. Despite this, they are all being unjustly detained here without any new evidence.”
The prosecutors’ demands have affected him personally. “Since that day, I’ve been taking pills for high blood pressure,” he says. On 17 February this year he and his wife drove from Ferizaj to Pristina wearing black T‑shirts under their jackets bearing the slogan “Freedom has a name,” a phrase linked to Adem Jashari. Tens of thousands gathered to mark independence and to protest the trials in The Hague; many people waved flags and wept.
“It’s wonderful to be here and see the whole population out on the streets,” Haxhimusa says. “We’re celebrating, but we’re also protesting. Because without our leaders, who are on trial in The Hague, there is something missing.”
This article was translated from German.