TIRANA, March 5 – The heroic resistance of Kosovo’s Jashari family against the Serb occupation in the 1990s is being showcased in Tirana in an exhibition featuring more than 100 items and artifacts belonging to Kosovo’s most famous family led by late legendary commander Adem Jashari.
The exhibition which first showed in Prishtina in late 2014 and is curated by Sadik Krasniqi, brings back the unique resistance of the Jashari family to the Serb army through pictures, documents, media coverage and video footage.
“This exhibition is dedicated to the heroic resistance of the Jashari family in Prekaz to the murderous Serb regime for more than one decade until the heroic fall of 59 martyrs of freedom led by legendary commander Adem Jashari in Kosovo’s glorious epic from March 5 to 7 1998,” said Arsim Zeneli, the director of the Kosovo Museum at the opening of the exhibition in late November 2014 in Prishtina.
The exhibition targets raising awareness on the sacrifice of the Jashari family and Kosovo’s Liberation Army which brought freedom and independence to Kosovo supported by NATO-led bombings against the Serbian army.
Sadik Krasniqi, the curator of the exhibition, says the artifacts displayed in this show include items from the everyday life of the Jashari family and the genocide and terror they experienced by the Serb army. He describes the sacrifice of three generations of the Jashari family for freedom in three days in March 1998 as unique in world history.
The exhibition, which comes as part of the joint Albania-Kosovo calendar of cultural events, will remain open at the National Museum of History until March 11.
The legendary commander
A Kosovo nationalist figure and guerilla fighter, Adem Jashari (1955-1998) was an independent-minded warlord from Prekaz in Drenica who took part in the armed revolt against Serb rule, initially in 1991 and later as a commander of the Kosova Liberation Army. An attempt to catch him for the murder of a Serb policeman failed on January 22 1998. A larger Serb force appeared in Prekaz on March 5, 1998, shelling and bombing the Jashari compound for three days until Jashari was killed. Fifty-eight other people were also slain in the attack, forty-six of whom belonged to Jashari’s extended family. Among them were eighteen women and ten children under the age of sixteen.
With his fierce resistance and his dramatic death, Adem Jashari, known as the “legendary commander” became a quintessence of the Albania freedom-fighter determined to rid Kosovo of Serb occupation and was hailed as a martyr for Kosovo’s Liberation Army. What is left of the compound of the Jashari family in Prekaz has been preserved as a museum and has become the object of mass pilgrimage in recent years. The bodies of the Jashari family lie buried in a graveyard nearby. (Biography by Robert Elsie, specialist in Albanian studies).
