How a Kosovo Exhibition Ignited a Battle Over Memory

An exhibition chronicling Kosovo war atrocities was shut down by local authorities, igniting a bitter public feud over historical memory, data accuracy, and state negligence.

Mar 28, 2026

On March 24, 2026, two Kosovo-based organisations, Admovere and Integra, opened a public exhibition in Pristina’s central “Mother Teresa” square, presenting what they described as a chronological documentation of 49 massacres committed during the 1998-1999 Kosovo war1.

The exhibition, titled “Massacres in Kosovo 1998-1999”, drew from a broader body of work documenting 105 incidents. Organisers stated that only those cases supported by photographic evidence and witness testimony were included in the public display, while the full dataset appears in a 2024 publication of the same name. The initiative received financial support from Kosovo’s Assembly alongside private and international donors.

In public statements, the organisers said their work relied primarily on data compiled by the Humanitarian Law Center, led by Natasa Kandic. They noted that Kosovo institutions still lack an official, comprehensive registry of war victims, making existing datasets the only available reference.

Within three days of its opening, the exhibition became the subject of escalating controversy.

On March 27, Berat Buzhala, owner of the media outlet Nacionale, published a series of posts and articles criticising the exhibition and its author, Shkelzen Gashi. In one article, the outlet described the exhibition as “a scandal” and alleged that it “echoes Serbian propaganda in the centre of Pristina”.

Berat Buzhala's Facebook posts throughout March 27, 2026.

The Disinformation Merchant
Buzhala cries “Islamic terror” to distract from Serbia-linked killings—because when justice knocks on the door, it’s his narrative house that risks collapsing. — The GPC’s Information Warfare Desk.

The criticism centred on specific representations of wartime events, particularly the Dubrava prison massacre. Survivors cited in the article disputed the exhibition’s figures and classifications.

One survivor, Sadik Zeqiri, was quoted as saying, “In Dubrava there were no armed prisoners. All were defenceless. This is not just a mistake, it is a serious distortion of the truth.”

Another survivor, Enver Dugolli, said2 that presenting some victims as “armed persons” was “completely untrue” and risked reinforcing “Serbia’s false narrative”.

Further criticism focused on how victims were categorised in the exhibition. Articles highlighted that in some cases individuals were divided between “armed” and “civilian” categories, based on source material. In the case of Prekaz, reporting suggested that the number of civilians presented as victims differed from commonly cited figures, prompting accusations of minimisation.

Responding to the criticism, Gashi said3 the data used in the exhibition was drawn directly from the Humanitarian Law Center’s records.

“We cited this list because we do not have another comprehensive list of all those killed,” he said, adding that discrepancies in classifications, such as individuals recorded as “armed”, were present in the original dataset. He questioned how such classifications could apply in cases like Dubrava prison, where detainees were widely understood to have been unarmed.

Admovere and Integra issued a formal clarification4, reiterating that their work relied on existing documentation and emphasising that, in some cases, individuals recorded as armed in source databases may have been civilians at the time of their killing. They called on Kosovo institutions to compile an official, verified list of war victims to prevent future disputes.

The controversy intensified when Perparim Rama ordered the immediate suspension of the exhibition5.

In a public statement6, he said the display presented “an inaccurate and unacceptable version” of the Dubrava massacre and “insults the dignity of the victims and citizens of Kosovo”.

Kosovo’s Assembly responded by distancing itself from the content, stating7 that while it supports initiatives related to collective memory and documentation, it does not intervene in or endorse the narratives presented by funded projects. The Assembly added that concerns raised would be communicated to the organisers.

The debate quickly spread across civil society. Activist Rron Gjinovci defended the exhibition’s methodology, stating8 that Kosovo still lacks an official record of war victims and that existing data, including that of the Humanitarian Law Center, remains the only available reference. He argued that discrepancies in classifications may reflect how victims were recorded by families or institutions, rather than deliberate distortion.

Other voices, including Durim Jasharaj, described the controversy as reflecting broader societal gaps in addressing wartime documentation. He said9 the limitations in data accuracy were not the responsibility of individual researchers but stemmed from the absence of a comprehensive institutional effort over nearly three decades.

By the end of March 27, what began as a public historical exhibition had evolved into a wider dispute involving media, survivors, researchers, political institutions and civil society, centred on competing interpretations of wartime documentation and memory.

At its core, this dispute is not merely about numbers or classifications, but the consequence of a structural vacuum that has been produced and tolerated for years. The absence of an official, comprehensive, and verified registry of war victims is not an administrative oversight, it is the result of political decisions that, at critical moments, placed documentation behind power interests, fragile compromises, or reluctance to confront the full weight of the past.

That vacuum did not emerge spontaneously. The Institute for the Documentation of War Crimes in Kosovo was first established in 2011 under the government of Hashim Thaçi, but its work was cut short in 2018 when it was shut down by the government led by Ramush Haradinaj while Thaçi was President, then in coalition with the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) and NISMA. The closure10 disrupted the continuity of evidence-gathering, fragmented institutional memory, and left Kosovo without a centralised state mechanism to document and verify wartime crimes.

Efforts to restore that capacity began in 2020 under the first government of Albin Kurti and continued under his subsequent administration. After a prolonged and often criticised process, Kosovo’s Assembly adopted the law on July 13, 2023, formally paving the way for the re-establishment of the Institute11. Yet the years lost between 2018 and 2023 created a gap that no legislative act can easily repair, particularly as witnesses age, memories fade, and evidence becomes harder to recover.

In such a fragmented landscape, disputes like the current one become almost inevitable. Survivors, researchers, and institutions are left not only to interpret the past, but to reconstruct it from incomplete and sometimes inconsistent sources. Every discrepancy becomes a point of contention, not necessarily because of bad faith, but because there is no universally recognised factual baseline.

This is where the deeper risk emerges. When a state fails to document its own truth in a sustained and uninterrupted way, that truth becomes vulnerable to distortion. Unless this institutional gap is addressed with consistency and independence, controversies like this will not remain isolated incidents. They will become part of a recurring cycle in which history is contested in public, rather than anchored in a shared, verified, and protected record.