My Father

My father is a quiet man. A hard-working man. A man who watches over his family, always, and who makes everything possible for it. He is the pillar: not only of our household, but of our whole extended family.

He was born in 1958 in Perlepnica, the eldest son, which meant responsibility from the beginning. His father made it possible for him to study: philosophy and sociology, in Prishtinë.

He was, and still is, deeply philosophical and spiritual, in harmony with nature. And when you live in harmony with nature, you stand by yourself, you value yourself, you protect yourself. You stay positive, and in harmony with your surroundings.

But in this harmony there was a disruptor: the Serbian regime. The regime turned my father, like many fathers in Kosovë, and many mothers, my mother among them, into fighters. Why? Because this oppressor was disturbed by an ethnicity, a language, a culture, by the very existence of these people. They wanted to erase it. Genocide was not the only thing they committed, and Kosovë was not the only place. They wanted to take our language. Our culture. Our faith. And by faith I do not mean religion. I mean the belief in being, in existing, in being allowed to live and to love.

Not everyone let that happen. My father was among the first to organise student demonstrations and to spark resistance. In those years he acted under a pseudonym, because acting under his own name was too dangerous. He made sure the regime's story was not the only story being told. He and his heroic friends resisted. For years.

That resistance had consequences. My father had to endure a great deal. Some people think suffering means sitting in a cell. I believe the greatest suffering is when someone tries to steal your identity.

After many years as an activist, a report by Amnesty International finally freed him from that suffering. A whole family was relieved. A whole village. A whole city. My father was free again.

But nothing would be the same. It had become too dangerous. He had to leave the country he loves, and watch from afar as war broke out.

The activist in him never stopped. From Switzerland, from a distance, his work carried on: fundraising, money, goods, support that kept reaching the country. The whole family was involved. The whole family carried those years. All of it out of love. All of it with one goal: to be free. To live. To love.

An illustrated timeline of his path will follow: the student, the activist, the refugee, the father. Alongside him: my mother, my grandparents. Because everything counts in a family's structure.