Kosovo Political Prisoners Recall Brutal Internment on ‘Barren Island’

"After one month in isolation, I was forced to work as a carpenter. The working conditions were very hard. There was a deep snow, ice and freezing temperatures," said Bajraktari.

"Most of us had no blankets. Some had a blanket of [size] one metre by one metre. The windows had no glass and my cell filled up with snow. The food was disgusting."

Bajraktari has since died, and his words come from a new book called 'Distorted Shadows', which is published in English and Albanian and is being launched in Pristina on Wednesday.

The book, published by a Pristina-based NGO called Integra, whose work focuses on peace, reconciliation and human rights contain interviews with Bajraktari and 11 other former political prisoners who spent years in the notorious Goli Otok detention camp, where around 3,500 people were held.

Bajraktari was not a member of any organised ethnic Albanian group resisting the Yugoslav Communist regime in Kosovo. He was arrested after he took part in a demonstration in Pristina in April 1981, when Kosovo Albanian students took to the streets to demand more autonomy within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

After being tortured in various prisons in Kosovo, Bjaraktari was sent to Goli Otok in February 1984, and put straight into solitary confinement. He was eventually released in April 1987.

'Can I endure this torture or not?'

Interior of the former Goli Otok prison. Photo: Flickr/Xandroid.

The dominant narrative about Goli Otok is that it was a detention centre for political dissidents who expressed pro-Moscow ideas at a time when Yugoslavia was severing ties with the Soviet Union, and that later it became a prison for young inmates.

However, this narrative...