TURIN — In the spring of 1999, all of Europe watched as fighter jets took off from Italian bases to bombard President Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia. Operation Allied Force, as the NATO operation was called, was carried out in the last months of the war between what remained of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (which by then only included Serbia and Montenegro) and Kosovo.
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After 78 days of shelling, which caused thousands of civilian deaths, Serbian troops agreed to end their military campaign. And the hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees, a large majority of whom was of Albanian origin, slowly started returning home. During the conflict, Serbian troops in Kosovo carried out some of the most horrific war crimes on European soil since the end of the Second World War.
A novel published in 2019 recounts the war as no one ever did before: through the sweet beginning and the tragic end of a love story, the one between Arsim and Miloš, who met in Pristina, Kosovo’s biggest city, in 1995. Arsim is Albanian, while Miloš is Serbian, and their love is a blasphemy, in fact, even two blasphemies: the first is being homosexual in two deeply heteronormative societies; the second is kissing with mouths that speak a different language and which, according to politics, should exchange nothing more than insults and hate speech.
The novel, Bolla, was written by the Finnish-Kosovar writer Pajtim Statovci. It narrates with rare effectiveness the tragedy of queer identities run over by nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Meanwhile, 25 years after the end of the conflict, a queer community, determined to claim the identity that decades of opposed nationalisms have denied them, has developed in Pristina.
Facing nationalism and religion
“Not even our community is immune to nationalism,” says Dan Sokoli, who lives in Pristina and is an activist for Dylberizm, a support platform for the LGBTQ+ community active in Albania and Kosovo. “I have met queer people in Serbia who refuse to recognize the independence of Kosovo and the crimes that Serbian people have committed here. At the same time, I have heard Albanian and Kosovar queers using extremely violent words against Serbs, especially in the last year, when there were tensions in the north of the country.
It’s a shame, because we live through the same oppression. When you go on TikTok and see Serbians and Albanians fight, people are always exchanging homophobic insults in the comments. This is why we have to learn to work together.”
The Equal Rights Association for Western Balkans and Turkey (ERA), a second-tier body that brings together 82 LGBTQ+ activism associations from all Balkan countries, is as close as it gets to the “working together” that Sokoli talks about.
Kosovo has also been among the most conservative countries on civil rights.
Amarildo Fecanji, the association’s executive director, says that “it is not easy to have so many different stories on the same table: Slovenia, Albania, Turkey, Croatia and Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. But it’s exactly because it’s not easy that doing it is important. ERA was born to preserve peace as well.”
Building support networks for marginalized groups seems even more complicated, and therefore more important, in places where public opinion is more traditionalist and peace is more precarious, such as Kosovo.
The Kosovar society is one of the most religious in the Balkans. According to a 2020 study by the University of Boston, less than 1% of the country’s population consider themselves as atheists, while more than 90% of the inhabitants are Muslim.
Kosovo has also been, for a long time, among the most conservative countries on civil rights: the country didn’t host a Pride event before 2017; the queer community would gather in secret; and a 2015 study of the National Democratic Institute found that Kosovo was the most homophobic country in the Balkans.
A difficult legal framework
The national constitution, adopted in 2008, clearly forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation in its Article 24. Even the constitutional definition of marriage, which does not contain any mention to gender and sexual orientation, was conceived to favor the possibility of legalizing same-sex marriage in the future.
That is a major departure from the Serbian constitution, from which Kosovo declared itself independent in 2008, where marriage is strictly codified as the “union between a man and a woman.”
Yet, a modern constitution is not enough to prevent discrimination. Not even the pronouncement of the President of the Constitutional Court, who in 2014 declared that same-sex marriage is legally compatible with Kosovo’s legislation, is enough. As of June 2024, neither marriage nor civil union is legal for same-sex couples in Kosovo.
Another obstacle makes the situation even more complicated: the 2006 “Law on Family,” approved when Kosovo was under the administration of the United Nations, defines marriage as the union between “two people of different genders.”
In 2022, Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti proposed an amendment to the law, which would have allowed the recognition of same-sex civil unions. But the proposal was not passed by the Parliament, where it was strongly opposed by the more traditionalist wing of the Vetëvendosje! party, which Kurti leads.
Governmental contradictions
Among its radically independentists positions, Vetëvendosje!, which means self-determination in Albanian, also gathers some progressive stances: calls for social justice and direct democracy are found in the party’s political program, along with plans to move closer to the civil rights legislation of Western countries. These positions are also a way to distance the country from Serbia, the governments of which never stopped flirting with Russia.
At the same time, the party maintains some rather conservative positions as well, net of the difficulties of ideological framing, which are common in the Balkans. Within Vetëvendosje!, some members are hostile toward UN and EU efforts to mediate between Serbia and Kosovo, elements of sovereignism and Albanian nationalism, and claims to the Muslim religion as a cultural element to oppose the Orthodox religion professed by a majority of the Serbian population.
“This equation between religion and identity has historically brought back to the surface fundamentalisms that are extremely dangerous not only for LGBTQ+ people, but for all minorities in the Balkans,” Fecanji says.
The contradictions within the governing majority make it difficult to maintain a coherent position vis-a-vis the LGBTQ+ community. For this reason since Kurti’s reelection in 2021, no significant steps forward have been made either for homosexual or transexual people, in Kosovo cannot legally change their name or gender under any circumstance, not even if they undergo hormonal therapy or surgeries to change their gender.
Government support for the LGBTQ+ community is more visible every year in Kosovo.
“The government cannot, because of political logics, support the community too openly. It is not a position that would find widespread support among the Kosovar electorate,” Sokoli explains, noting the complicated relationship between Kurti and the queer community.
For Fecanji, the weak political support around the LGBTQ+ community allows nationalist and religious groups to use homophobia to garner the support of a specific electorate.
“LGBTQ+ people are the easiest target if you want to be noticed by the conservative electorate. But when authoritarian, patriarchal and nationalist groups gain support, their discrimination never stops at one minority. They expand and target all those who are not ready to align, even people who felt safe before the elections,” Fecanji said.
Nevertheless, government support for the LGBTQ+ community is more visible every year in Kosovo, at least in terms of communication. Last June, Prime Minister Albin Kurti and Health Minister Arben Vitia marched together with the protesters during Pride: a signal of how the cultural climate is changing in the young Balkan state.
Things are different
Another signal of the positive moment that the Kosovar queer community is living is the success of the first edition of the Pristina Queer Festival. In September 2023, a group of Dylberizm activists inaugurated the first festival on queer culture in the history of Kosovo. The three-day festival, curated by Sokoli, featured workshops, panels and performers that gave the local queer community the feeling that in Kosovo things are changing for real.
“During the festival I felt full of hope. I felt that we have made important steps since the 2015 study found us to be the most homophobic country in the Balkans. The Ministry of Culture and Youth financed us. The mayors of Pristina, Perparim Rama approved all of the activities. It went well overall,” Sokoli said.
An event like this, in the center of Pristina would have been unthinkable even just 10 years ago. The festival posters had the acid colors and bombastic fonts one would expect to find on the posters of a contemporary art gallery in Berlin or Amsterdam. But the program included events reworking and problematizing elements of local culture.
“We managed to show that the queer community in Kosovo has a deep tradition.”
“The most beautiful thing is that we managed to show that the queer community in Kosovo has a deep tradition, rooted in the folklore of popular music. For a long time it was thought that queer people suddenly appeared after the war, at the end of the 1990s, and that they didn’t exist before. We wanted to show that we existed before the war, during the war and that we exist now,” said Sokoli, who mentions Bolla as his favorite novel.
Sokoli talks about how good it was for the Pristina queer community to see their drama and their city represented in the pages of the admittedly painful story of Arsim and Miloš. Speaking with him brings clarity on how festivals, books and events where the community can finally come together, like stitching closed a wound that has been open for decades.
“As a teen, I felt like I was the only gay person in my city,” says Sokoli. “Today, thanks to Pride, the festival, thanks to the book by Statovci, things are different.”
