Vjosa Musliu ’08: Growing Up in War

When Vjosa Musliu ’08 first started writing a book about her childhood experiences during the Kosovo War, she wanted to preserve her memories. 

“I started writing it in 2012 first as a move against forgetting, then as a way of making sense of what I could not make sense of as a child,” says Musliu, an Albanian. “After a while it became a cause for intellectual disobedience.”

The result of her efforts is “Girlhood at War: Interpreting War and Liberation in Kosovo” (Bloomsbury Publishing), a collection of short stories about Musliu’s experiences as an Albanian living under Serbian rule during the late 1990s and the eventual liberation by NATO forces. 

The book is both a collection of personal essays and an academic analysis of the war and the ensuing liberation, told from the rare perspective of a young child who is today, an associate professor of international relations at the Free University of Belgium (VUB). 

 “The overwhelming majority of academic productions about war and peace-making has been written by scholars who have not experienced either,” she says. 

Musliu experienced both.  

Second Class Citizens

Musliu grew up in Gjilan, Kosovo. Although her childhood was filled with love and warmth, it was also dominated by Serbia’s oppressive rule over Kosovo Albanians, which relied on repressive measures of control. 

“By the time I was old enough to play in the street, the government in Belgrade (capital city of Serbia) had installed an apartheid-like system in Kosovo whereby ethnic Albanians were massively laid off from public jobs, schools (teaching) in Albanian were closed, (and) the public space became a homogenous Serbian space,” Musliu says. “Growing up in a setup like that whereby you are rendered as second class citizen in your own space, grows you up overnight.”

The first signs of conflict were subtle, she says. She remembers being required to whisper whenever she spoke Albanian in a public space and to avoid certain streets and neighborhoods where Albanians were the target of police intimidation. “Wars do not start like the Olympics,” Musliu says. “Nobody cuts off the ribbon first to then shell civilians or launch an attack over a hospital.”

Long simmering tensions erupted when war broke out in March 1998. Serbian troops began to attack the civilian population and the loosely formed Albanian guerilla movement known as the Kosovo Liberation Army. Reports of mass killings by the Serbs triggered an international outcry.  The fighting finally ended in June 1999, with the arrival of NATO peacekeeping troops. 

That year, Musliu celebrated her 14th birthday dressed in a U.S. military uniform and holding an unloaded gun. She became an informal translator for U.S. troops stationed in her city, often translating between angry Albanians who sought revenge against the Serbs and NATO troops who insisted on not picking sides. 

“Working as a translator as a 14-year-old was in a way my very embodied entrance into the field of peace and conflict studies,” Musliu says. “I was seeing hands-on how these mechanisms work. I would later sit in auditoriums and listen to senior scholars as they theorized about those same events.”  

A Global Perspective

In 2004, Musliu moved to Albania to attend the University of New York Tirana, Empire State University’s international partner in that country. Growing up among U.S. marines and NATO soldiers, Musliu was thrilled to get a degree from an American institution. 

“I grew up with the utmost adoration for the U.S. NATO troops,” she says. “They were the ones who saved our lives back in 1999 and put an end to Serbia’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.”

Ironically, it was through her courses at SUNY Empire that Musliu was exposed to literature critical of U.S. global interventionism. “The four years became formative not only in my intellectual upbringing, but also in terms of personal development,” she says.  

After getting a degree in international relations from SUNY Empire in 2008 — the same year Kosovo declared independence — Musliu returned briefly to Kosovo to work as a journalist. In 2009, she moved to Belgium. She finished her master’s degree at Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and went on to get a Ph.D. at Ghent University. After doing two consecutive postdocs at the VUB, she became a tenured professor there. 

Today, Musliu, her husband and their eight-year-old daughter are permanent residents of  Belgium, Kosovo, and Turkey. Because her extended family still lives in Kosovo, she travels there frequently, both for work and to enjoy skiing and spring retreats in the Kosovo mountains. 

In celebration of International Women’s Education Day, Musliu will discuss her book with the SUNY Empire community at noon on Monday, March 9. Visit sunyempire.edu/alumni for more information coming soon.