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The exhibition organised by the Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo opened on Monday, with personal items on display like notebooks, report cards, clothes, shoes, school bags, toys, photos and short stories evoking memories of the children killed in Kosovo between 1998 and 2000.
Enver Duriqi, whose two daughters and two sons were killed in the town of Podujeva in March 1999, was one of the bereaved relatives who attended the opening.
“The youngest was 21 months and the eldest was nine years old,” Duriqi recalled tearfully, holding his eldest son’s school report card.
Mejreme Kelmendi, another parent whose children were killed, came from Gjakova/Djakovica to see the exhibition.
She said it was painful for her to remember the details of the deaths of her two sons, Besim and Haxhi, who were 12 and ten years old.
“In this exhibition, I see the blanket with which I covered my children,” she explained.
“It would be better that those bullets would have caught me and not my children… so, I would not have seen their photos here,” she added.
A total of 1,024 children were killed in the Kosovo war, and 109 are still missing, according to the Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo.
The exhibition will be open to visitors at the Hivzi Sylejmani library in Pristina until May 2020.
The exhibition ‘Once Upon a Time and Never Again’ in Pristina. Photo: Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo.
Ethnic Albanian children cry outside the house where Asllan Gashi, 26, and his wife Merita, 23, were killed, along with another woman in May 1998. Photo: Blerta Begisholli.
Photo: Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo.
A cradle used by the Berisha sisters from Hoca e Vogel/Mala Hoca, who were killed in April 1999 while their family was fleeing to Albania; they were among 12 children killed that day. Photo: Blerta Begisholli.
The shoes of a boy who was killed in April 1999 in the village of Nagavc/Nagavce, alongside his sisters and nine other children. Photo: Blerta Begisholli.
Photo: Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo.
A painting by Alban Kukaj, a child killed during the war in Kosovo. Photo: Blerta Begisholli.
