All visitors leave the Reporting House with their own impressions. But some of these visitors were active protagonists and contributors to the resistance of 1989-1999, which is a central focus of the Reporting House museum. 

One such special visitor is Burhan Kavaja, a man in his eighties who, upon entering the  Reporting House, stopped in front of the first screen showing footage from the 1989 Trepça miners’ strike in Mitrovica.

Kavaja started to talk about his colleagues’ names and duties, then said: “This is me,” while gesturing towards a man wearing a Trepça uniform and sitting at the conference table speaking to the media about the striking miners’ demands for the rights of Albanians in the former Yugoslavia.

The protest where Kavaja was speaking was organized a month before the suppression of Kosovo’s status as an Autonomous Province under Yugoslavia, a status that Kosovo enjoyed until March 23, 1989.

In 1988, Burhan Kavaja, an engineer who graduated from the Faculty of Engineering and Mining at the University of Belgrade, was named director of the Trepça flotation mine in Stantërg. Just a year after taking office, he faced one of the biggest challenges of his career– the Trepça miners’ hunger strike. As director, he was a co-organizer of the strike and responsible for thousands of miners on strike.

This strike, which was organized by Trepca Mine workers on February 20, 1989, was a protest demanding proper representation of Albanians in the Yugoslav parliament. The miners did not want to be represented by Albanians who were named by Milosevic, but by delegates elected by Kosovo’s people. The protesters demanded the resignation of Albanian deputies who were considered Milosevic’s party puppets.

The protest differed fromothers because it was a hunger strike and stopped the production of Trepca, which affected the entire economy of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. The miners knew that the Croatian and Slovenian press would cover the strike more independently. They hoped that other republics would be discussing the violated rights of Albanians in Yugoslavia.

“The most difficult moment, or the biggest challenge, was how to keep the miners alive, without getting hurt or making sacrifices,” Kavaja recalls.

While the Serbian National Assembly was preparing constitutional amendments that would suppress Kosovo’s autonomy, over 1,300 Trepca miners began their eight-day hunger strike. They demanded to uphold autonomous status and the resignation of three Albanian politicians appointed by Slobodan Milošević in Kosovo. After about a week, the first miners’ walkout took place and about 180 miners were hospitalized. Meanwhile, on the evening of February 27, 1989, Rrahman Morina, Ali Shukriu, and Husamedin Azemi, the leaders of the pro-Milošević faction in Kosovo, resigned. In that late evening, the Presidency of Yugoslavia met and took “special measures” against Kosovo, effectively imposing an unlimited state of emergency that opened the way for additional police from Belgrade, forcefully firing Albanian civil servants and expelling Albanian pupils and students from schools and faculties. Fifty strikers barricaded themselves inside the Stantërg mine, nearly 1,000 meters underground.

“We had to prepare the second exit and at that time the ventilation shaft was completely frozen. We had to have teams to clear the ice and enable the exit from 1,000 meters underground where the miners were to get them out. That was my main concern and now I can say that that experience had psychological and physical trauma, because it was very difficult to do that,” Kavaja confessed, while staying at the Reporting House on January 15, indicating that he had never believed that they would get out alive.

“Knowing that we had 2,400 kilograms of explosives there, I thought we were all going to die. However, today after 36 years I am still alive,” he said with a slight smile.

“It seems to me that (the youth) do not have much information about our  sacrifices, that today they are educated and that they are in positions and have their own families. It seems to me that very little is being read about history and few people are informed about our difficult past,” he said.

“It was not easy. In the 1940s we had about seven or eight intelligentsia, and in the 1970s this number increased to 70,000. In other words, the leadership at that time did its best to teach people, to educate them, so that they would be today’s professionals,” Kavaja recalled, appreciating the documentation of the resistance of generations for the freedom of Kosovo in the Reporting House.

Reflecting on his sacrifice, Kavaja had a message about “bayraktarism”— a word referring to those who later tried to take credits on the miners’ strike.

“The miners’ strike was the biggest strike in the world. Eight days and eight nights (on strike) for political issues. Usually, miners’ strikes are social, but these have been purely political ones, for freedom,” Burhan Kavaja said.

Burhan Kavaja was born in Mitrovica on May 9, 1943. He graduated in Engineering and Mining from the University of Belgrade. In 1970, he worked as deputy secretary of the Provincial Secretariat for Economy. From 1990 to 1994, he chaired the Executive Council of the Union of Independent Trade Unions of Kosovo. Kavaja was elected MP in the first Kosovo parliamentary elections in 1992, a parliament that never manifested because of Milosevic’s regime repression.