Liberation through Education: The Case of Kosovo
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As an individual born in London, the relationship I’ve formed with education has been deeply privileged. Education was a given for me growing up, a “normal” reality of a person’s upbringing. However, for my parents and my ancestors, the relationship they had with the educational structure of their contexts was very different. It was only when I embarked on researching Kosovo’s history in my adulthood that I was exposed to the position education held within Kosovo’s historical context and why my parents were so vocal about the importance of my education.
Paulo Freire states that education can “either function as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom”. This quote serves as a prophetic encapsulation education would come to hold within Kosovar society throughout the 20th century. At several points in Kosovo’s history, the structure and practice of education was used to either uphold systems of oppressive power or as a means to challenge them vehemently.
By writing this piece, around the 16th anniversary of Kosovo’s independence, I aim to motivate others to think more critically about Kosovo’s history, and to expand our collective understanding of educational resistance movements. This piece blends together personal narrative and research to convey the precarious role of education in Kosovo’s historical context and why I believe it to be an imperative analytical category when speaking about Kosovo’s movement for self-determination.
Historical context
Kosovo was incorporated into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1918 (later simply the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). My parents relayed to me the stories their grandparents told them of the great difficulty they experienced in this transitional period. Albanians in Southern Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia were forcibly placed into a state system where anti-Albanian sentiment was commonplace. This is supported by racialised narratives expressed by Serbian journalists and academics in the early 20th century, claiming that Albanians were “the most barbarous tribes of Europe”, “European Indians” and “lazy savages”.
Jen Reuters, when speaking about the position of Albanians in this interwar Yugoslavia (1918-1941), states that “the Albanian had no right to develop their national culture.…school education in Albanian was just as illegal as the publication of books and literature in that language”. When analysing the motives behind the policing of cultural and linguistic expression for Albanians, a quote from a Serbian official in 1921 illustrates this intention: “Albanians will remain backward, unenlightened, and stupid….it is in our interest that they remain at the present level of their culture for another twenty years”. My paternal family had left Kosovo in the 1920s due to these very circumstances. Eventually, they returned to Kosovo after facing difficulties in the eastern Anatolian context during that time.
Sabrina Ramet cites an estimate from 1918-1921, that the expulsion of Albanians from Kosovo reduced its Albanian community from around 800,000-1,000,000 to roughly 400,000. While it is difficult to know for sure what exactly the demographic changes of Kosovo were, it is clear, supported by oral history and research, that Yugoslavia's interwar policies significantly affected Kosovar society.
Educational restrictions became instrumental in how Yugoslavia engaged with ethnic Albanian communities, weaponizing pre-existing societal structures to isolate and disenfranchise them. This served as an extension of Yugoslavia’s brutal colonial practices in Kosovo and other parts of its Southern territories (mainly parts of present-day Macedonia) at the time. This approach was married with other political and social policies such as settler colonialism, forced expulsion, and expropriation through land reforms, all tasked with the agenda of creating a hostile environment for Albanian people. This lack of access to Albanian education significantly impacted ethnic dynamics within Kosovo itself, with the minority Kosovo Serb community (and other Slavic ethnicities) holding an overrepresented place in its social structure.
This naturally had implications for my own family. My maternal grandfather, Ibrahim Qerka, had descended from a family of city dwellers with a rich urban history in Prishtina. He existed within a social class that also expressed a fluid sense of ethnic identity, as their ethnic manifestation was an amalgamation of Albanian and Balkan Turkish identity. However, the fact that there was no Albanian language education easily accessible during this interwar period, though Turkish schooling was still in use, pushed my grandfather (and many others like him) into an ethnic label of solely ‘Turkish’.
By creating a binary of Serbian and Turkish education within Kosovo, the state sought to fragment the Albanian community, and in some cases instigate forms of cultural assimilation, mostly impacting those urban communities who naturally had a fluid sense of ethnic identity after centuries of Ottoman rule. This played into Yugoslavia’s goal at the time to forcibly change the ethnic demography of Kosovo through conducting various population exchanges with Turkey. With the use of societal structures like educational rights as well as social and political representation, Yugoslavia rendered Kosovo and other parts of its south unlivable for the Albanian community. Therefore, many ethnic Albanians used these population exchanges as a means to escape the tyranny of Yugoslavia’s system at the time.
Using education as resistance
However, people in Kosovo were not passive in the face of these violent systems, many organised themselves. While over three-quarters of Albanians in Kosovo remained illiterate by 1941, this was because “they refused to send their children to Serbian schools”. This can express a form of resistance, whereby Albanians would have much rather remained illiterate than educate themselves within a system that sought to pacify them.
This interwar period saw the development of an intentional form of resistance inherently connected to education. Another one of these methods was the implementation of underground educational facilities. While Albanians were constrained in their political representation, they did have the Xhemijet/Džemijet Party for a limited time, an organisation representing the Muslims of Yugoslavia (Albanians, Slavic Muslims, Muslim Roma & Turks).
This party rallied for the opening of Albanian language schools; however, this would not occur, and the party itself was disbanded in 1925. But what members of this party did was implement localised forms of resistance, developing “underground activity and helped revive secret schools”. They used Islamic centres of learning, turning them into spaces of Albanian language education. While this was often accessible for mainly young boys & men, the presence of these ‘underground schools’ in a language considered “illegal” was an act of great defiance.
Albanian Education in SFR Yugoslavia
A volatile relationship with education carried on even after the Second World War in Kosovo. What did change, however, was Kosovo’s position within SFR Yugoslavia: it would be designated an ‘Autonomous region’ (later Province), and it had its boundaries clearly drawn in 1946.
Although Kosovo had gained an elevated political position within this system, the freedoms of its people were still significantly limited. Kosovo memorialises this time as the “Ranković era”, where from 1947 to 1966, Aleksander Ranković governed Kosovo with the use of his secret police forces, continuing a tradition of violence, intimidation, humiliation, and instilling a culture of fear and ethnic inequality. It was during this period that my great-grandfather was tortured by these secret police forces, during a programme of disarmament. This era also forced three of my mother’s uncles to entirely uproot their families from Kosovo to Turkey once more, due to the persistent instability that Kosovo faced. Not only was there a lack of education, but the capacity to lead a functional life was especially difficult.
As one who is personally and academically invested in issues pertaining to former Yugoslavia, I find that my arguments are often steadfastly undermined by “Yugo-nostalgics” who regard any critique of the socialist system as some type of personal attack. However, by installing an individual like Ranković to govern Kosovo, Tito maintained ethnic divides and societal inequality, in no way formulating an environment for “Brotherhood and Unity” to be a social anchor for Kosovo’s people.
There have been many first-hand experiences I had with individuals from various former Yugoslav countries, who continue to perpetuate anti-Albanian tropes historically rooted in Yugoslavia’s maltreatment of Albanians. For example, the very term “Shqiptar'' which we Albanians use as a term to describe our ethnicity in our language, was appropriated by Yugoslavia's system. It was bastardised and formulated as a pejorative. This term when used in the Yugoslav context denoted connotations of inferiority, ugliness, backwardness, and untrustworthiness. The term is still often used today, instead of the neutral “Albanac”. This plays a significant role in the preconceived notions people from former Yugoslav countries have of Kosovar Albanians and the way they engage with our lived experiences. Furthermore, I urge those within communities that were once a part of the former Yugoslavia to be more understanding of the positionality Albanians held within Yugoslavia and recognise that our experiences within all forms of the Yugoslav structure were inherently different as a non-Slavic ethnic community.
However, much like during the interwar period, the Albanians of Kosovo would not remain passive in the face of such systems. It was their political activism in part that led to the removal of Ranković in 1966. This lack of Albanian education at all levels, once more conveyed the continuation of restrictions, leading to mass-scale demonstrations in the late 1960s led by educators and students. Consequently, it was the actions of these people that led to the establishment of the University of Prishtina in November 1969 (accessible in the Albanian language, as well as Serbian and Turkish).
This move was significant in Kosovo’s history. It clearly illustrated the collectivised activism of Albanians in Kosovo. Kastrati affirms that this “period (1974-1989) allowed Albanians in Kosovo space to develop their cultural, political and national identity within this new educational system”. Albanians had historically been actively resisting and developing their spaces of education against a backdrop of repression, but these rights were now ingrained under the reformed 1974 Yugoslav constitution that gave Kosovo significant self-governance. This gave Kosovar Albanians some space to further develop aspects of their culture, politics, and collective consciousness.
However, this autonomy was a clear threat to Serbia. It was said that “Serbian authorities constantly fought against the idea of having an independent system of education for Kosovar Albanians”. This is indicative of the power that education holds within a social system that sought to maintain societal hierarchies and the fear it clearly provoked.
Having spoken to my father extensively about his experiences of Kosovo’s educational system at this time, he tells me that the ability to learn and speak his mother tongue was a great freedom, one many of his ancestors did not have. However, while Kosovo had an elevated position, it remained restricted in its ability to experience the full meaning of self-determination. Any individual calling for a “Kosova Republike” was met with harsh reproach, branded an ‘irredentist’ and oftentimes imprisoned.
My father was a mere 15 years of age when he was nearly imprisoned for simply writing “Kosova Republike'' on his class blackboard. An intensive and disproportionate “investigation” process followed suit, but thankfully my father managed to evade being sent to prison. I know it must sound crazy that a simple statement like that could see one face prison time. But these societal realities are further supported by Kastrati’s work, where he states that most of the political prisoners “came from Kosovo schools and the university….”, indicating the central role educators and students played in resistance to the Yugoslav status quo. A status quo that normalised Kosovo remaining in an inferior position to the other republics in the Yugoslav system. Therefore, making the demand for full and unwavering self-determination, in the form of statehood for Kosovo, an act to be thwarted and demonised. This approach still plagues discussions around Kosovo’s independence to this day.
As the 1980s went on, the situation in Kosovo worsened, culminating in an event that saw Kosovo’s powers entirely revoked as an autonomous province in 1989. Slobodan Milošević, the notorious Serbian president, manipulated the political and social situation to revoke all self-determination rights, effectively placing Kosovo under Serbian dominance once more. One of his very first aims was tackling the state of education in Kosovo, with “thousands of Albanian professors and students from primary to university level…dismissed, only Serbs were allowed to have access to public schools”. This instant attack on educational rights can further support the power education held in Kosovo’s society. It had been helping the Kosovar Albanian community to access knowledge, aiding them in the ability to establish a framework to seek liberation in the face of oppressive systems.
This change in Kosovo’s political and social position forced my parents to leave in 1994, recognising that the disintegration of all that they knew was well underway, that a Kosovo where Albanian education was simply not properly accessible was no place to raise a family. However, Kosovar Albanians organised themselves once more, reestablishing ‘underground’ educational spaces to serve their own liberatory goals. Reviving the necessity for Albanian language education at all levels, even turning residential homes into universities. Kostovicova states that “students headed for makeshift classrooms in private houses, adapted shops, attics and cellars.”
These underground spaces of education served as an important initiative for the people of Kosovo. They functioned as a sad reminder of the historical instability the people of Kosovo have faced, but also as an indication of the intergenerational resistance Kosovo implemented when its rights to full access to education were undermined. Kostovicova goes on further to say that “the parallel education system was simultaneously a metaphor of prison and freedom for Kosovar Albanians…education in private houses epitomised Albanian non-violent resistance in Kosovo”.
My conclusions
I wrote this piece not to simplify Kosovo’s history and its path to independence. I urge others to investigate more about how Kosovo became a state because it concerns many factors that exist beyond just education. I also do not seek to minimise the experiences of other ethnic groups within Kosovo’s historical context. I promote freedom and liberation for all, inclusive of those diverse ethnic communities from Kosovo.
I felt compelled to write this directly due to the first-hand conversations I have had with family members and elders from my community. The emphasis my parents put on education in my upbringing, conveyed a much deeper intergenerational scar. My mother had once dreamt of being a nurse. But sadly she was 19 in 1989 when the troubles properly began in Kosovo, so her dreams were cut short and other societal duties took her time. My father, on the other hand, also had dreams of studying but his focus on the political situation in Kosovo took most of his energy. It was within this familial context that I grew to properly understand the significance of my education, pushing me to steer my academic research on Kosovo’s historical and cultural trajectory.
I also wrote this piece to urge all of us to think more critically about the significance education plays in our lives, but also how we may often take it for granted, especially in the context of diaspora communities. Education should not serve as an instrument of oppression but sadly has been weaponized to uphold systems of violence. Education should exist as a method to help us learn, grow, achieve freedom, and exist as a medium to explore the great breadth and depth this world's knowledge has to offer.
But, as we navigate state structures, which are in essence an artificial concept, we must always be clear about the importance education holds to those communities native to their lands. Access to education in one’s native tongue should be as easy as taking a breath. As I have illustrated with the case of Kosovo, people will always find ways to manifest spaces of learning in their natural languages, serving the urgency to preserve their cultures and identity, while also pushing them to pursue liberation.
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