Kushtrim Koliqi, a Pristina-based film and theatre director and human rights activist, has for more than a decade been using his art to push forward sensitive topics related to transitional justice and dealing with the past.
Koliqi’s artistic work, in combination with his day job as executive director of the Kosovo NGO Integra, which deals with transitional justice issues, has resulted in many successful projects that focused on civilian victims of war.
One of the biggest projects that Koliqi and Integra have worked on is ‘People and Memories Talk’, which saw narrative documentaries produced featuring the testimonies of war victims.
“Initially we had the Kosovo edition, in which we produced 59 documentary films that were broadcast in prime time on [state television channel] KTV,” Koliqi, 34, told BIRN.
Based on the Kosovo edition, they also produced a regional version with 30 narrative documentary films of victims’ stories from all over the former Yugoslavia.
“These were broadcast on six TV stations of six countries, so the outreach was huge,” he said.
The project was important because it created platform for war victims to speak without censure, he argued.
He explained that “the logic of the regional programme was for stories from Kosovo to be heard in Belgrade and vice versa, stories of Bosnians to be heard here [in Kosovo] and vice versa, so the civilian victims of wars to be heard and seen”.
‘I want to be heard’
Another project that Koliqi worked on was a cycle of publications entitled ‘I Want to be Heard’, in which a memory book with the testimonies of ten victims of the Kosovo war was initially published in 2008.
In 2017, another memory book was also published featuring the testimonies of ten women who were raped during wartime, plus supportive testimonies from two of their husbands.
“We included these two supportive testimonies since this [type of war victim] is stigmatised firstly by their families, so we wanted to have positive examples- to show that there are husbands supporting their wives,” Koliqi explained.
The book was published in Albanian and English, and in Serbian in Belgrade, where one of the planned speakers at its launch was to be the former Kosovo President Atifete Jahjaga, but she was denied entry to Serbia.
“Protesters entered [the building] aiming to prevent us from promoting the book in Belgrade,” Koliqi recalled.
Integra is also a founder of the arts festival Miredita- Dobar Dan, which exchanges cultural productions between Kosovo and Serbia and is staged each year in Belgrade.
“We believe that the Belgrade mainstream audience has no information about what has happened in Kosovo. Apart from the cultural programme, we also have debates with artists talking about the past,” he adds.
The latest project directed by Koliqi is a video exhibition called ‘Missing Persons Through the Eye of the Camera’ with images taken by Pristina-based photographer Atdhe Mulla, who also works for BIRN.
“If there are some people for whom the war in Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia still continues, it is two categories of victims: raped women and missing persons,” Koliqi said.
He argued that there is still “no political will to deal with the issue” of missing persons; around 1,600of whom still remain to be found after disappearing as a result of the Kosovo war.
This video exhibition includes photographs of four families of missing persons and their belongings, along with interviews, and Koliqi hopes they will be exhibited on Kosovo’s independence day on February 17 at the parliament building in Pristina.
“We are advocating that the opening be on Kosovo’s independence day because for us and especially for families of missing persons, it is important that even when there is celebration to remind politicians the obligations they have towards this category of war victims,” he explained.
Read more at Balkaninsight
