Lessons from Kosovo’s widows: how to rebuild a European village after war took its men

Along Kosovo's R107 highway, in a landscape of car washes and marble shops that smell of vinegar, one village's future is in a cooperative that packages ajvar, a roasted red pepper pâté.

This cannery is located in Krushë e Madhe, a farming village in western Kosovo, and was started by Fahrije Hoti and other widows like her, with the support of international organisations.

With more than 140 war widows in a municipality of just 3,000 inhabitants, the place is known as the village of war widows.

Three women in black, one of them at the wheel, get out of a vehicle a few metres from the factory. They explain that there are many widows in the village, “and in the next one over”.

Between February 1998 and December 2000, more than 13,000 people were killed or went missing in Kosovo’s war, when ethnic conflict between Serbs and Kosovar Albanians escalated in the final stage of Yugoslavia's disintegration.

Of these, more than 10,000 were Kosovar Albanians, about 2,000 were Serbs and the rest were Roma and Bosniaks, according to the Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo.

Sexual violence was used on a massive scale as a weapon of war.

So what could have been done better for survivors and what lessons can be learnt when it comes to other conflicts?

Financial insecurity, trauma and prejudice

“We have been through so much, and I was left alone with seven orphans,” says Meradije Ramadani, who lives near Krushë e Madhe, in a trembling voice. “Then we were forced to flee because of the Serb occupation, which destroyed us, our houses and everything we had,” she exclaims.

“Thank God Albania opened its doors to us,” she continues. "Then we came back.”

It has been 26 years since Meradije Ramadani's husband was killed and 25 years since she returned to Kosovo: “When we came back, we found nothing standing, everything was razed to the ground, burnt, reduced to ashes, completely destroyed,” she recalls.

She remembers that, in that first year, they slept in the open, “in tents, under plastic sheeting, we had no house to sleep in”.

Despite this, she continued to take her daughters to school: “Both my husband and I always wanted them to study and to be somebody,” she says. Today, she says she is proud: “I educated them, I got them married and I have 17 grandchildren,” she says. "And all seven children have jobs”.

On the night of 24 March 1999, Nato began a series of bombing raids on Serb forces. It was the first time it had done so without a UN mandate and with the participation of German soldiers.

The next day, in the afternoon of 25 March 1999, paramilitaries and the occupying Serb army entered Krushë e Madhe and took away its men in retaliation.

“Teacher, teacher, teacher...,” says Irfon Ramadani, pointing, one after the other, to the portraits displayed in Krushë e Madhe’s Massacre Museum.

Ramadani was eight years old when the massacre took place: “They separated the women on one side and the men and boys on the other, and took them away,” he recalls, as he walks through the museum, where he is now a guide. In the display cases are exhibited the letters, clothes, glasses and books of his murdered neighbours.

Among them, a backpack caked in mud. “Even in times of war, he never left his backpack or his books behind,” reads the words of the mother of a 17-year-old boy who wanted to become a doctor.

In the summer of 1999, Hoti returned to the ruined village alone with her two children, Sabina, a three-year-old girl, and Drilon, a baby.

There were many women in the same situation and they faced a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, mourning the death of her husband; on the other hand, social prejudice against her taking a role usually reserved for a man. Hoti started selling ajvar and honey to neighbours and organised herself with other women.

Today, her cooperative employs more than 60 widows and her story was made into a film, Zgjoi (Hive).

However, most of them were unable to set up a business.

"Life was extremely hard, especially for the widows, who often spoke to me about the hypocrisy of the situation: on the one hand, they were put on a pedestal, celebrated as the widows of the martyrs, as the ones in charge of training the next generation, but at the same time, they received very little support", says professor Hanna Kienzler.

Kienzler is an anthropologist and co-director of the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Society and Mental Health at King's College London.

She lived in Krushë e Madhe between 2007 and 2009 to research the effects of war on the mental health of women survivors. Since then, Kienzler has returned to the village every year (except for the pandemic).

Kienzler says that, at the time, a widow's pension was €62.

"Do you know what you can buy in Kosovo with that amount? A bottle of cooking oil costs two euros and a pair of trousers costs the same as in Germany or anywhere else," she says. They had to use it to finance their children's education and often take care of other dependents. “This again created extreme stress,” she says.

In 2014, Kosovo’s government implemented a system of compensation for different groups of war-affected people, which was increased in 2025.

In addition to the financial insecurity and the trauma, there were social expectations: “They themselves or their children had to learn to drive the tractor, and once they had the harvest, women could not sell it themselves at market, because women simply did not sell things at market at that time,” Kienzler recalls. “Therefore, they often had to hire relatives or neighbours to sell their peppers,” she adds.

Most could not live on their own either. Some women even had to give up their children. For Kosovar Albanians, as is the case with other groups in the Balkans and South Caucasus, the family is “patrilocal”; when a couple marries, the wife and husband are expected to move in with his parents and the children are considered to belong to the paternal family.

This makes the system “organised along the male paternal line” and sons are necessary to maintain the family line, explains a UN/World Vision report. Thus, some widows had to return to their parents' homes, while their children were raised by mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law.

Flora, who was widowed at the age of 24, told a Balkan Insight investigation that she had been forced by her in-laws to return to her parents without her daughter, who grew up believing she was an aunt.

“If a woman was widowed and wanted to return to her parents' house, in most cases she was forced to leave the children behind, so many widows continued to live with their in-laws,” explains Kienzler.

And while widowers were expected to find a partner soon, for widows it was still taboo to remarry. In 2010, there were 5,052 war widows in Kosovo, and only 20 had lost their widow's pension because they had remarried (0.4 percent).

Because of this, and because most did not have long-term financial support, very few managed to build their own businesses, “but this does not mean that they were not incredibly strong”, says the anthropologist, who gets teary-eyed during the video call.

She raises the example of women like Ramadani who managed to put her six daughters through university, “even though, at first, many in the village didn't support her”.

'We need to speak out to end the stigma'

While they were battling social expectations on the outside, shame, suffering and memories consumed them on the inside.

Talking about the trauma was not easy.

In her research, Kienzler calls it “symptom talk,” referring to the fact that sometimes talking about these horrors is so disturbing that it's enough to say, “I just remembered and now I have this headache or stomachache, and people knew what they were talking about, because they had all experienced similar things.”

Vasfije Krasniqi was 16 years old on 14 April 1999, when she was abducted by a Serbian police officer, taken to another village, and then tortured and raped by several men.

She says it changed her life forever. Vasfije was one of the first people who dared to admit publicly that she had suffered sexual violence during the war: “I want the world to understand that justice delayed is justice denied,” she said, in no uncertain terms.

Krasniqi warns that survivors of wartime sexual violence “need both immediate and long-term support, not decades of silence”, and underlines that governments must act quickly to recognise victims, provide mental health care and bring perpetrators to justice.

Krasniqi believes societies must change the way they view survivors: “We are not to be pitied or seen as symbols of shame. We are witnesses to history, and our courage can help prevent future atrocities. If my story teaches anything, it is that truth and dignity are powerful forms of justice and that silence only protects the perpetrators, never the survivors,” she adds.

Almost two decades after the end of the war, in February 2018, the Kosovar authorities established compensation of €230 for survivors of sexual violence.

However, due to the stigma attached to recognising oneself as a survivor of abuse, only 1,870 people had applied by 2023. An estimated 20,000 women and men suffered sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Widows and overnight migrants

On the other side of the conflict, an estimated 200,000 ethnic Serb and Roma civilians fled Kosovo for Serbia in 1999.

A Human Rights Watch report in August 1999 described the “wave of abductions and killings of Serbs” since mid-June of that year, including the massacre of 14 Serb farmers, as revenge for atrocities committed by Serb security forces prior to Nato's entry. Many of those displaced were women.

“These women had become widows overnight and had to flee immediately to Serbia in search of refuge for themselves and their families - their children, parents, relatives... - so, widowhood was accompanied by emigration to the country of their ethnic group, where in many cases they were not well received”, the Serbian sociologist Mirjana Bobić and co-author of the study ‘On widows and social injustice’ (2020) said.

War widows and migrants took on the role of breadwinners, “often working as vendors, cleaners, carpenters, café staff and bakers”, explains Bobić. Some were unwell.

“As the state was not very supportive, they mostly depended on family and friends who had fled with them”, says Bobić. She says that the state was not used to taking in so many refugees in such a short time from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina — the number was over 600,000, according to UNHCR’s data.

Moreover, those who did not work could not count on Serbian state pensions before the age of 45. So their only income came from allowances or funds given to their children, based on proof that the father had died or disappeared in the war, explains Bobić. “This meant going back to the places they had fled, looking for bodily remains and presenting evidence.”

The context changes, but in any post-war period, social, economic and psychological support mechanisms are essential to deal with both trauma and financial insecurity.

In Ukraine alone, it is estimated that there are already tens of thousands of war widows.

This article was first published by the Spanish media El Confidencial, and written as part of the PULSE project, a European initiative to support cross-border journalistic cooperation.