RDN
“Everything disappeared in a second”
October 7, 2026
For years, V.B. believed her father’s property would be divided equally among his four children. She was only eight years old when her mother died. Her father had two daughters from his first marriage and also a son and a daughter from his second. He had repeatedly told the children that each of them would receive an equal share of the property.
For V.B., this carried additional weight. As she says, part of the family’s property had also been acquired through her late mother’s contributions.
Before his death, her father drew up a will that, according to V.B., included all four children equally. But several months later, however, as his health deteriorated, the will was revoked. V.B. says her father told her that her half-brother, with whom he was living, had pushed him to change it.
After her father’s death, the family property — including a large house with a yard and a large commercial property in the center of Gjakova — was registered in her half-brother’s name.
For eight months, V.B. and her sister tried to resolve the dispute within the family. At first, their brother promised to compensate them for the house, but refused to negotiate over the commercial property, insisting that it belonged to him because he was the son.
After eight months of waiting, V.B. says he denied ever promising that amount and instead offered what she describes as a “ridiculous” sum.
Now that negotiations have failed, V.B. and her sister have started legal proceedings to seek what they believe is their rightful share.
But seeking justice also comes with an emotional cost.
For V.B., starting the legal process means not only entering a legal dispute, but repeatedly returning to a conflict she had hoped could be resolved within the family.
“It is not only financially costly, but emotionally painful too,” says V.B.
V.B.’s story is not simply a dispute over family property, but a reflection of a wider gap between women’s legal right to inherit and their actual access to family property in Kosovo.
Women remain significantly underrepresented among registered property owners in Kosovo. In 2024, women owned or co-owned around 19.8% of properties recorded in Kosovo’s cadastral registry. By 2025, the figure had risen to 21.5%.
But these figures do not show how much family property women inherit. They also include properties women have purchased themselves, as well as jointly owned property registered in their names and those of their husbands.
To understand what lies behind the numbers, K2.0 surveyed 22 women about their experiences with family inheritance: how property was divided, what explanations they were given, whether they had ever claimed the share they were entitled to and how these experiences had affected their lives.
Of the 22 respondents, 14 currently own property in their name, while eight do not. But owning property does not necessarily mean inheriting it. Of the 14 women who own property, only five acquired it through family inheritance. Seven bought property themselves with their own income, while two co-own property with a spouse or partner.
When it comes specifically to inheritance, nine women said they had never received the share they were entitled to, while in another six cases, the family property has not yet been divided. Only five said they had received a share equal to that of their brothers, while two said they had received a smaller share.
Meanwhile, 15 of the 22 women said they felt free to accept, claim or renounce their inheritance, while seven said they did not. Six women said they had not been informed of their legal rights before a decision was made.
In many of the cases included in the survey, family property was passed on to the son, often without any explanation.
A 54-year-old woman from Prishtina says: “My brother inherited it. While us, the sisters, got nothing.”
Asked why, she says: “No reason was given. It was simply given to my brother.” She describes the experience as leaving her feeling “frustrated, undervalued and unequal.”
For a 45-year-old woman from Prishtina, the message was more explicit. After the family property was passed to her brother, she was told: “You have your own home.”
She says she had to build her life without support from her family.
“I had to start from scratch. I financed everything myself. I never received any help.”
In another case, a 54-year-old woman from Prizren says her brother secretly completed the inheritance proceedings a year after their father’s death, declaring himself the sole heir despite having four sisters.
“He took all the property for himself without our permission,” she says. When asked what explanation she was given, she answers: “Not a single one.”
However, the experiences of the women surveyed vary.
A 39-year-old woman from Prishtina says she received an equal share of the family property without having to ask for it.
“There was no need. Everything had been arranged beforehand.” Her parents had told her and her brother: “You are equal, just as the love, care and security that we have given you and had been equal.”
For a 62-year-old woman from Ferizaj, the impact was simple: “I just feel equal to my brothers.” Her family had mentioned respecting the law as the reason for dividing the property equally.
These cases show that outcomes are shaped not only by what the law provides, but also by how families understand property, equality and women’s place within the family.
Between rights and tradition
The experiences of the women surveyed by K2.0 reflect a broader trend documented by the Center for Information, Critique and Action (QIKA).
According to Kosovo Cadastral Agency data analyzed by QIKA, women accounted for only 17.7% of people who inherited property in 2024, compared with 82.3% men. In 2025, 43,880 inheritance cases were registered for men, compared with 10,042 for women.
For Blenda Asllani, researcher and project manager at QIKA, these figures point to an inequality that continues to be reproduced through the ways property is inherited and gifted within families.
“Property continues to circulate largely along the male lines of the family, while inheritance and gifting continue to function as mechanisms through which men’s economic and social power is reproduced,” says Asllani.
According to Asllani, one of the social norms shaping how women exercise their inheritance rights is the belief that, after marriage, the daughter becomes “part of another household” and that property should remain in the son’s family.
“This social norm also produces another phenomenon documented by the research: families turning their backs on women who decide to claim and exercise their rights,” she says.
The pressure becomes particularly visible when women decide to renounce their inheritance. According to Asllani, such a decision cannot always be understood as a free choice.
“Women’s giving up their right to inherit cannot be understood as a fully free and informed choice,” she says.
In many cases, she adds, women may see giving up property as a way to preserve family relationships.
Inequality can begin even before a woman has the opportunity to make a decision. According to QIKA’s research, in 90–95% of the cases analyzed, inheritance proceedings are initiated by male heirs.
“This creates the possibility that women are excluded from the process from its earliest stages,” says Asllani, while emphasizing the need for institutions to identify and notify all heirs equally.
Inequality, then, does not necessarily emerge only at the moment property is divided. It can begin much earlier: in the way a family thinks about property, in who initiates the proceedings and in how well-informed women are about their rights.
What does the law say?
The experiences described by the women in K2.0’s survey differ sharply from what Kosovo’s inheritance law provides.
According to lawyer Edona Sina, daughters and sons have fully equal inheritance rights.
“A daughter’s marriage, leaving the parental home or the fact that she has started a family of her own does not diminish or invalidate her right to inherit,” says Sina.
When a parent dies without a will, the children and spouse inherit equal shares. But before the inheritance can be divided, it must first be determined whether any part of the property was acquired jointly during the marriage. Property registered in the father’s name may therefore include a share that belongs to the mother.
This is particularly relevant in cases such as V.B.’s, as she says her mother contributed to the purchase of the house and commercial property.
A will does not necessarily exclude a daughter from inheriting either, but that does not mean she will benefit to the same extent as her brother. According to Sina, the difference often lies in how the property is distributed among the heirs.
“In practice, recently, parents have started leaving property directly to their daughters too, but in much smaller shares than what they leave to their sons. For example, if the deceased has two houses, land and a commercial property, the son gets everything, while daughters are left with only a small commercial property shared between them,” says Sina.
Another issue concerns women who “give up” their inheritance in favor of a brother. Sina points out that, legally, this may mean transferring their share of the inheritance to that particular heir, rather than simply renouncing it. Women should therefore understand exactly what they are signing.
The law also provides safeguards against decisions made under pressure. A person renouncing an inheritance must be interviewed separately, without the other heirs present, and the court or notary must ensure that the person understands their rights and the consequences of their decision. If there are indications of pressure, the renunciation should not be accepted.
For Sina, the central problem is not the absence of legal equality, but the gap between the law and its implementation in practice.
“Historically, the problem in Kosovo has not been so much the absence of equality in the text of the law, but the failure to put that equality a reality in practice,” she says.
Family pressure, gender stereotypes, and a lack of legal knowledge continue to shape women’s decisions about inheritance. Sina advises women not to sign inheritance documents they do not fully understand and to seek independent legal advice if they feel under pressure.
In V.B.’s case, what once appeared to be a secure family agreement to divide the property equally ultimately ended up in court. Beyond the house, the commercial property and their monetary value, she says the dispute has changed the way she thinks about what her parents left behind.
“I no longer see it as something my parents left me,” she says. “It feels like, apart from the memories, I have nothing left of my parents. As if, everything disappeared in a second.”
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Author: Donika Gashi
The mind-bending that never ends
September 2, 2026
After Mladić’s death, the public space was flooded with denial of crimes, belittling of victims and glorification of criminals.
I first heard about Ratko Mladić at the end of May 1992, when I was nine years old. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had already been going on for a long time. We replaced the apartment with a shelter, mistreatment of Sarajevo civilians became part of everyday life, and life was increasingly being reduced to waiting, fear, panic, uncertainty and shooting.
At that time, we still had electricity, so I heard Mladić’s order on television to “hit Velušići”. After his interlocutor Mirko Vukašinović corrected him that it was Velešići, he gave his famous order that has been deeply etched in my memory: “Hit Velušići and hit Pofalići, there are not many Serbs there”. He ordered that the Presidency and the Parliament be kept under direct fire and that the areas around Dobrovoljačka, Humska and Đure Đakovića streets be “hit”, with the demand that they be shelled so much that people could not sleep and that “their minds be bent”.
The mind-bending continued for the next three and a half years. Sarajevans were subjected to systematic terror – we were denied food, electricity and water, the city was kept under siege for years, and life was reduced to survival. People ate food from humanitarian aid that even dogs wouldn’t eat. Mladić’s soldiers shot people like clay pigeons – sniping at children and adults, and shooting and targeting people standing in lines for bread and water.
The mind-bending has not stopped even almost 31 years after the end of the war. Nor will Mladić’s death change anything. What he and his soldiers left behind are mass graves, dead and butchered people, ruins, ethnically cleansed territories and mass support. Instead of murals and plaques in the Republika Srpska entity, we will now see his monuments. He will be buried with full military honors in Serbia.
The passage of time will certainly contribute to him being given numerous characteristics that he had not possessed in the slightest, because that is how it is with myths and legends. Ideology does not disappear with the death of anyone, it usually strengthens even further, inscribing mythical characteristics in ideologists. We are witnessing exactly this these days.
‘He defended the Serbs from the new Jasenovac’
If we are to believe the famed “experts” who are attacking us from all sides these days – from the media in Republika Srpska and Serbia, not to mention social media networks, that cesspool of uncensored opinion, the people of Sarajevo have actually done all this to themselves. I will deal with this disgusting relativization, denial and rewriting of facts in the rest of the text. For this is no longer just about different interpretations of the past, whatever that worn-out term means, but rather an attempt to obscure the responsibility of the perpetrators, to question the victims, and to declare thoroughly documented facts a conspiracy and replace them with more suitable versions of events, and to declare the crime a heroic defence. This is a serious form of historical revisionism and normalization of crime. But this is nothing new, nor did it happen with the death of Ratko Mladić.
One only needs to look at the media content that comes from the mentioned areas every July 11 or one of the dates commemorating war sufferings, such as, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, the anniversary of one of the numerous massacres. Or let’s say the annual celebration on January 9.
It is safe to say that this reaction was expected, but one cannot help but remain speechless before the “interpretations” coming from the mouths of numerous public figures, who take turns like clockwork, not to mention the opinions of influencers and other “employees” of social networks.
For example, Sarajevo-born Ljiljana Smajlović, former editor of the Oslobođenje daily, explains in her commentary on Euronews Serbia that Serbian history will remember Mladić as a general who defended the Serbs who remained in the former Yugoslavia to live in the territories where he defended them. “Neither the Hague verdicts nor the hatred of our neighbors in the region will be able to do anything against such a fact, which is a fact. Ratko Mladić is the commander under whom they survived, or, as the myth will say, in folk tales, in my opinion, the folk tales will say that Jasenovac was not repeated and genocide against Serbs was not repeated because of Ratko Mladić.”
This thesis has been present in the public space for a long time, especially on social media networks. According to this interpretation, ethnic cleansing is “defence”, the actions of military and paramilitary formations that cleansed eastern Bosnia and numerous other parts in the first months of the war in 1992 are defence of the home, and that the home is “defended” by paramilitary formations composed of soldiers who have nothing to do with BiH. All of this, as well as the mind-bending of Sarajevo residents, to use the thesis of the aforementioned editor, is nothing more than defence against a new genocide. It’s enough to make you wonder if you’re losing your mind.
The crimes in Prijedor were also “defence”. We can also hear that thesis served to us by smiling “interpreters of the past” in the comments of ordinary people that we have the opportunity to watch on various TV stations with announcements that we will now hear what the citizens think about Mladić’s death.
He definitely knew what he was doing
Ratko Mladić was already a well-known name at the time of the order we mentioned at the beginning of the text. Without dwelling on his biographical data, especially since hundreds of such texts have been published so far, I will remind you that he was a professional Yugoslav National Army (JNA) officer, that he graduated from the Military Academy in Belgrade as the best in his class, with an average grade of 9.57. He spent his entire professional life in the army, advancing through command positions in Skopje, Ohrid, Kumanovo and Pristina. During the war in Croatia, he was in Knin. Therefore, he did not enter that war as an inexperienced soldier, but as an already formed and highly ranked officer of the Yugoslav army.
His war journey did not begin in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As commander of the 9th Knin Corps of the JNA, he participated in the war in Croatia in 1991. The Šibenik County Court sentenced him in absentia to 20 years in prison. His crimes in Croatia, however, were not included in the Hague indictment, not because they were unimportant, but because the Prosecution focused on the most serious crimes for which it had the strongest evidence.
I would like to remind the readers of another statement of his. On May 12, 1992, Mladić made it very clear that he understood the nature of what was being prepared. Speaking about the plan for the ethnic separation of the population, he said: “We cannot clear, nor do we have a sieve to sift [people] only so that the Serbs remain or the Serbs to remain and the rest leave […] I don’t know how Mr. Krajišnik and Mr. Karadžić will explain this to the world. This, people, is genocide.”
He knew very well what he was doing and he knew the nature of the violence he was carrying out. This is perhaps best demonstrated by what he said in front of the cameras in Srebrenica on July 11, 1995. After the city fell, he presented the victory of his forces as a “gift” to the Serb people, saying that the time had finally come, after the historic rebellion against the Dayi (Ottoman military officers), to “take revenge on the Turks in this region.”
Crime documentation
The post-war years were marked by his hiding in Serbia, just as many others are still hiding there. According to data from non-governmental organisations, there are at least 67 of them. His hiding ended in 2011 following his arrest almost 16 years after the Srebrenica genocide. The “objective” interpreters of the past will spend decades explaining that nothing happened there. Then they will claim that a crime did happen, but that legal qualifications and numbers are inaccurate, only to arrive to the claim that Mladic was a humanitarian who saved women and children and that the killed men were actually soldiers.
At the time the proceedings began, the indictment against him had 11 counts, the trial lasted almost five and a half years. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide in Srebrenica, persecution, extermination, murder, deportation and forcible transfer, terrorizing the population of Sarajevo, unlawful attacks on civilians and taking UN personnel hostage. The Appeals Chamber confirmed the verdict and life sentence in June 2021.
None of this is enough for his followers, because there is another claim – the Hague Tribunal tried only Serbs, it is a NATO court (although these same followers ardently support the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, never mind that it is one of the most powerful NATO allies), the witnesses are false, he was imprisoned innocent, and even the latest claims appeared that he was poisoned and killed in prison.
The volume of evidence is best illustrated by the statistics of the process itself. The trial lasted almost five and a half years, of which 530 days were spent in hearings, 377 witnesses testified before the Trial Chamber, while a total of 592 were called to testify, and 9,914 exhibits were included in the file. The Chamber also took into account around 2,000 facts that had already been established by final judgment from other proceedings. The evidentiary proceedings lasted more than four years, and the closing arguments were held in December 2016. The first-instance verdict from 2017 had 2,526 pages, while the final, appeal verdict from 2021 had more than 1,304 pages. Anyone who doubts the objectivity of the court, the witness statements, and the evidence can read all these documents for themselves, when they take time away from praising Mladić on social media, and they can make their own judgment.
Reactions from the Federation of BiH
These days, politicians and other public figures from the Federation of BiH entity are calling on citizens to report to the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH all those who deny genocide and glorify war criminals. If a person were to really take up this job, they could sit for days and file reports, because so much denial, belittling of victims and glorifying of criminals is present in the public space. After all, it is quite clear that it is impossible to process such a number of cases, even if there were a political will to do so. And we have long been convinced that the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH is anything but a professional and politically independent institution headed by professionals. There is much evidence for this, much stronger than those that tell us that The Hague was created to convict “Serb heroes”. In this regard, it is difficult to expect that it will be the place where this story will end seriously and consistently. And we should have no illusions about this.
The media these days is flooded with content about Mladić, much of which boils down to the banal transmission of what this or that influencer said, as if every post on social media represents a relevant contribution to understanding war and crime. In this chaos, a much more serious, but equally banal relativization is also creeping in, which is carefully packaged in a seemingly fair message that “everyone should be held accountable” – because no, not everyone can be held accountable in the same way, nor can the sentences be the same. A man who has been finally convicted of genocide, persecution, murder, terrorizing civilians and other serious war crimes cannot be put on the same level as someone who is responsible for, say, not prosecuting criminals, for remaining silent, relativizing or politically obstructing the confrontation with crimes. These are not the same types of responsibility, nor can they be reduced to the same moral and legal measure, as “lovers of justice” are telling us these days. If we are going to equate them, then we no longer need the courts. We can immediately introduce one universal punishment for everyone, so that everyone gets it, regardless of what they have done. Thus, in the name of alleged equality and reconciliation, we would actually abolish the very idea of individual responsibility and the gravity of the crime committed.
Mladić’s death will not bring back the dead nor will it bring peace to the survivors. However, it is important that he did not die at large, but as a finally convicted war criminal, after a verdict in which his crimes were extensively documented. All of today’s relativizations cannot change that fact. No matter how hard the relativizers try.
Perhaps it is finally time to admit that the numerous NGO workshops of various international organizations on dealing with the past, reconciliation and building trust, in which facts were greatly relativised and tendentiously selected, did not achieve what they were supposedly intended to achieve. In fact, paradoxically, they often only further strengthened nationalist narratives. How much of this is a consequence of their methods, and how much of the real intentions of those who organized them, is a topic for another long article.
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Author: Belma Buljubašić
Featured image: Canva/Screenshot
This article was originally produced and published by Mediacentar. It has been republished here with permission.