Why Reporting House Still Matters as Serbia Rewrites Its Past

At eleven I watched foreign reporters document our suffering. Decades later, inside Reporting House, I confront how proof, courage, and memory stopped genocide from becoming silence.

I am back in Kosovo again. This time with the weight of return sitting heavier than usual. I had read about Reporting House¹ for years. I knew what it was meant to hold. I knew what it was meant to confront. Yet until now I had never made the time. Not because it was unimportant but because I understood instinctively that it would demand something intimate. This visit would not be casual. It would require me to stand still with memories I have spent much of my life learning how to translate for others.

I was eleven years old when the war broke out in Kosovo. Old enough to understand fear. Young enough to believe that the world might intervene simply because it should. I remember foreign journalists arriving in my neighbourhood. Their cars. Their equipment. Their accents. I remember how my parents spoke to them with urgency and dignity. How stories were told quickly because no one knew how long safety would last. I watched reporters document our lives as they unravelled. At that age I did not know the word reportage. But I understood instinctively that these strangers with notebooks and cameras were carrying something essential. Proof.

Those early encounters shaped everything. Over the last eighteen years reporting war and conflict has not simply been my profession. It has been my way of repaying a debt. I became one of them because they came for us. Because someone had to witness. Because silence would have been another form of violence.

Walking into Reporting House now as an adult journalist and as a survivor felt like crossing two timelines at once. The space does not overwhelm immediately. It reveals itself gradually. The first photographs are small. Illuminated boxes embedded in the walls. Images that force you to lean in. Mothers holding infants in displacement. Faces etched with exhaustion and terror. Bodies carried by neighbours rather than ambulances. The intimacy is deliberate. You are made to come close. To look carefully. To acknowledge that these were not symbols. They were people interrupted mid life.

Each image carries the ethical weight of restraint. There is no excess. No manipulation. Just the quiet authority of having been there. This is where Reporting House asserts its purpose. Journalism here is not spectacle. It is evidence. The cameras displayed behind glass are not nostalgic artefacts. They are instruments that once placed their owners in mortal danger. One Panasonic M10 VHS camera sits like a reliquary. It belonged to Gazmend Ademi. During the war it was hidden. Transported. Protected like a living thing. It recorded crimes that Serbian forces of Yugoslavia wanted erased. Villages burned. Families expelled. The slow methodical execution of a genocidal campaign.

This was not chaos. It was policy. Kosovo was targeted because its people existed where an imperial fantasy required emptiness. What was unfolding in those years was the final attempt to realise what had already bloodied Bosnia and Croatia. The construction of Greater Serbia demanded removal. Terror. Erasure. Reporting House never uses rhetoric to convince you of this. It does something far more devastating. It shows you.

Further inside the building the space opens. Hundreds of stones hang from the ceiling on fine threads. Each one extracted from Trepca. The mine that fed Yugoslav industry and imperial ambition. The stones float like suspended memory. Heavy yet fragile. Beneath them reflective surfaces multiply their presence. You feel surrounded by geology and history. By labour and repression. Text on the walls explains how Trepca was both resource and leverage. How Albanian miners striking in the late nineteen eighties were among the first to openly challenge Belgrade. How control of the mine meant control of livelihoods and futures. The stones are not decorative. They are witnesses too.

Inside Reporting House in Prishtina, an installation confronts power with its own debris: a throne forged from spent bullet casings faces images of mass protest and civilian suffering, reminding visitors that authority built on violence ultimately sits alone, exposed, and accountable to history. (© The GPC Illustration)

Large photographs line another wall. Protests. Crowds. Women holding white cloths reading Stop Genocide. Refugee columns stretching into distance. One image shows a woman bent over a body. Her grief is uncontainable. It resists framing. This is not tragedy aestheticised for consumption. This is documentation that strips the viewer of comfort.

For an international audience these images matter because Kosovo is too often reduced to abstraction. A Balkan problem. A diplomatic complication. Reporting House insists on clarity. What was happening was genocide in motion. Systematic. Organised. Ideological. The international community did not intervene out of impatience. It intervened because observation had failed. Negotiations had failed. Because by the time NATO acted the machinery of ethnic cleansing was already well rehearsed. The alternative was complicity.

What gives Reporting House its urgency is that it refuses to stay safely in the past. The past is present here. Slobodan Milosevic is gone but his political lineage remains². Aleksandar Vucic once served as his propaganda minister³. He has since recast himself for Western audiences while sustaining the same nationalist core. He has been identified as having participated in the Safari Killings in Sarajevo. Today his Serbia continues destabilising Kosovo through covert and overt operations. The abduction of Kosovar police officers. Pressure and intimidation of Kosovar Serbs who refuse loyalty to Belgrade. The killing of a Kosovar policeman. The attempted annexation of northern Kosovo during the Banjska attacks in September 2023. These are not isolated incidents. They are chapters.

Vucic now speaks of a Serbian World. A phrase unmistakably modelled on Russkiy Mir. It is the same imperial grammar. Cultural protection used to justify territorial aggression. Reporting House makes clear what this language leads to when left unchecked. It leads back to photographs like the ones on its walls.

As I moved through the final rooms I became acutely aware of silence. Visitors speak softly. Some not at all. This is not a space for performance. It is a space for reckoning. For me it was also a reunion with the origin of my own work. I stood there thinking of the reporters who came to my childhood home. Of the risks they took. Of the footage they carried out when borders were closing and truths were dangerous.

When I stepped outside into the cold Prishtina light I felt the familiar mixture of grief and resolve. Reporting House is not a museum of suffering. It is an archive of moral clarity. It reminds us that journalism can interrupt violence. That documentation can save lives even when it arrives too late for some. And that the work is never finished. Because memory itself is a battleground. And forgetting is always someone else’s strategy.

Why Reporting House still matters is precisely because history is once again being contested in bad faith. As Serbia recycles the language of grievance and reinvention, as old crimes are softened into myths and perpetrators recast as misunderstood patriots, this place stands immovable. Reporting House does not argue. It records. It reminds us that genocide does not begin with mass graves but with lies repeated until they sound reasonable. In an age when power depends on amnesia, Reporting House insists on memory. And in doing so it makes clear that the struggle over Kosovo is not only about territory or borders, but about whether truth itself is allowed to survive.

1. Reporting House Facebook Account.

2. The Day We Toppled Milosevic and How His Disciple Won

Twenty-five years after Milosevic’s fall, Serbia’s ex-propagandists run the state; Kosovo absorbs blows, and Britain’s security hangs in balance. The revolution was real, its reversal ruthless. — The GPC Balkan Watch.

3. Vucic’s Playbook: From Propaganda Minister to Architect of Destabilisation

Serbia’s brazen sabotage of Kosovo’s lifeline is an act of war, mirroring Kremlin’s tactics. Delay is betrayal, the West must crush Vucic’s destabilisation machine before it ignites chaos. — The GPC Balkan Watch.