Haxhimusa’s house stands in Doganaj, a mountain village in southeast Kosovo. A two‑storey family home, it has a front garden with old fruit trees and fields behind. Winter light falls on the façade and the living room is warm. On the table lie photos from another time: young men in uniform, barely older than 20, faces serious. Haxhimusa runs his fingers over one. “That was us,” he says quietly.
Now 58 and an ethnic Albanian, he was once a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the militia that fought Serbian police and the Yugoslav Army in the late 1990s. Today he leads a quieter life with his wife Vjollca, their daughters Zana and Gresa and son‑in‑law Fisnik. But memories of the past remain close.
As a young recruit he was arrested in 1987 after telling other ethnic Albanians he did not want to fight them. Sentenced to five years, he served three in a prison in Foča, in what was then Bosnia and Herzegovina. “We were just talking,” he says. Released, he returned to his mechanical engineering studies, worked with Kosovo’s Humanitarian Law Center and spent a year in Germany as a refugee before coming back.
The turning point came in March 1998 with 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 was among the first volunteers from Nerodime, where his village lies. The original group numbered 35 — 30 men and five women — many barely 20. He remembers having an old Kalashnikov, 90 rounds and two grenades. “Ninety bullets against an entire army.”
The volunteers eventually grew into a force of almost 1,000. Food and ammunition were scarce. They fought the Yugoslav Army, which Haxhimusa says fought against the whole population. When the war ended he stood on a makeshift stage in Ferizaj, with people on rooftops and NATO KFOR soldiers present. That moment, he says, justified their struggle.
Demobilised in September 1999, Haxhimusa worked with Kosovo’s provisional institutions and served as a city councillor in Ferizaj. On February 17, 2008, when Kosovo declared independence, he first 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 harder. Building state institutions took far longer than hoped. Nepotism, unemployment and emigration followed. Only in 2024 did Kosovars gain visa‑free travel to the EU. Haxhimusa feels the EU often leans toward Serbia in its dialogue with Kosovo. Yet he has no regrets: “Life is hard in Kosovo but we are free.”
February now brings another difficult memory. The Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, set up in the Netherlands in 2015 under EU pressure, have tried former KLA figures on alleged crimes including persecution, murder, torture and forced disappearances. The court is widely criticised in Kosovo as unjust, even colonial, and many see prosecutions as an attack on the independence struggle rather than an attempt at accountability.
Earlier in 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 this 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’ requests have affected him physically. “Since that day, I’ve been taking pills for high blood pressure,” he says. On February 17 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,” associated with Adem Jashari. Tens of thousands gathered to celebrate independence and to protest the trials in The Hague, many waving flags and shedding tears.
“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.