The ongoing, post-war construction of Albanian martyrs, memory and the nation in Kosovo has produced iconic tropes of militant resistance, unity and national independence. This critical interpretive account, based on years of the authors' ethnographic and political engagement with Albanians in post-war Kosovo, focuses on the making of a master narrative that is centred on the 'sublime sacrifice' of the insurgent KLA leader Adem Jashari, known as the 'Legendary Commander'. It also aims to trace voices of discord with this master narrative, testing contestations in terms of the rural-urban, political and gender divides in Kosovo-Albanian society. It concludes that the narrow international view of Albanians as either 'victims' or 'perpetrators' has contributed to the consolidation of this powerful narrative, its celebration of Albanian agency in militant resistance and the closing of public debate within Albanian society. This article focuses on the construction of a Pan-Albanian master narrative in post-war Kosovo 1 , a storyline for an independent country that also anchors a collective national identity. Kosovo is not an independent state and is no longer fully part of Serbia and Montenegro, but is held in a United Nationsled trusteeship. Its political status is a contested issue, whose negotiation is influenced by competing historical understandings and national identifications. Here we provide a critical account of the rise of a homogenising narrative in Albanian society, a subject that has not been given scholarly consideration until now. We concentrate on one symbolic event -the massacre 2 of the insurgent Jashari family, killed in the hamlet of Prekaz in March 1998 while fighting Serb troops. This was neither the only massacre nor the worst during the recent conflict, but is a place where many stories

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In this essay I explore the ways in which the internal Albanian politics of memory in Kosovo rely on a longer, lived history of militant self-organisation than the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) war period alone. On the basis of recent ethnographic research, I argue that the memory of prewar militant activism is symbolically codified, ritually formalized, and put on the public stage in Kosovo today. Not only has this process effectively rehabilitated and consolidated the personal, social, and political status of specific former activists, it also has produced a hegemonic morality against which the actions of those in power are judged internally. On the one hand, this process reproduces shared cultural references which idealise ethnonational solidarity, unity and pride and which have served militant mobilisation already before the 1990s. On the other, it provides the arguments through which rival representatives of the former militant underground groups (known as Ilegalja) compete both socially and politically still today. Although this process demarcates some lines of social and political friction within society, it also suggests that international efforts to introduce an identity which breaks with Kosovo's past and some of its associated values, face a local system of signification that is historically even deeper entrenched than is usually assumed.

The site of an infamous Serb massacre of a militant Albanian extended family in March 1998 has become the most prominent sacred shrine in postwar Kosovo attracting thousands of Albanian visitors. Inspired by Smith's (2003) 'territorialization of memory' as a sacred source of national identity and MacCannell's (1999 [1976]) five-stage model of 'sight sacralization', this article traces the site's sacred memorial topography, its construction process, its social and material reproductions, and adds a sixth stage to the interpretation-the 'political reproduction'. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the commemorative literature emanating from this shrine and on numerous interviews with core protagonists (including former guerrilla) and visitors, the article explores the ways in which the religious themes of martyrdom and sacrifice, as well as traditionalist ideals of solidarity and militancy, are embodied at the site and give sense to a nationwide celebration of ethno-national resistance, solidarity and independence. O verlooking the hamlet of Prekaz, in the central valley of Drenica where the Kosovo war was fought most intensely, the burned ruins of the Jashari family's compound stands as a reminder of a tragic event, rich JOURNEYS, VOL. 7 ISSUE 1 a1 J7.1 INSIDE-SB1 11/5/06 8:42 am Page a1 with symbolic significance. On March 1998, twenty members of this extended Albanian family were killed by Serb troops during a siege that lasted three days and resulted in many more casualties in the surrounding area. The Jasharis were among the founders of the clandestine Albanian guerrilla forces, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). 1 Since these events the Jashari family, labelled 'terrorist' in all official Serb proclamations (Tanjug 1998), have been celebrated by the Albanians as 'glorious martyrs' and their deaths as 'sublime sacrifice' to their nation. Indeed, the Jasharis' death forfeits ready-made categories of 'victims' versus 'perpetrators'. According to the commemorative literature, all members of the family freely chose to stay in their 'wounded tower-house' (Halimi and Shala 2000: 24) and they fought back defying fear of death. Today, the ruins of the family compound have been opened to visitors, a formerly private space turned public by the events and now serving as a sacred shrine to the Albanian nation. The family deaths and their selfdetermination embodied at this site promise the Albanian visitors that it is possible to become master of their own, national destiny. From 2000 to 2005 each of us often visited Prekaz. At the site, we observed and interviewed various Albanian individuals, families and participants on organized tour groups from across Kosovo, the region and the Diaspora. We also interviewed numerous visitors to the shrine off site, in neighbouring Albania, Pristina, the US and the UK. Our interlocutors on site, visitors and officials alike, never expressed discontent but rather only compliance with the site's ideology. In contrast to the diversity of experience and attitude described for other shrines in ...

In spring 1999, amidst a wider ethnic cleansing campaign, Serb police forces abducted Ferdonije Qerkezi’s husband and four sons, who were never to be seen alive again. She subsequently transformed her private house into a memorial to the lost normalcy of her entire social world. We trace this memorialization process; her struggle for recognition; her transformation into an iconic mother of the nation and her activism, both for missing persons and against the internationally-driven Serb-Albanian normalization process in Kosovo. From a multi-disciplinary perspective, we critically reflect on the theoretical concept of “normative divergence” in intervention studies. We are guided by social anthropological (including immersive, historical-ethnographic, and semantic) analysis of the core tropes of social memory as both narratively and materially embodied by the House Museum. In systematically juxtaposing these to the normative transitional justice principles of truth, justice, non-recurrence, and reparations, and the overarching international intervention goal of reconciliation, we critically interrogate normative divergence per se. The ethnographic “thick description” of this case study—cognizant of context contingency, victims’ agency and experience, cultural change, and social transformation—points to divergent meanings of these principles as resulting directly from the political and institutional failure to provide key transitional justice goals.