The 2001 Oak Human Rights Fellow was Sevdije Ahmeti, a 56-year old Albanian Kosovar, who has risked her life helping women and children war victims in Kosovo.

Ms. Ahmeti co-founded the Center for the Protection of Women and Children in Prishtine in 1993. The Center, of which she is currently Executive Director, now operates nine branches. Highly regarded by human rights practitioners familiar with her work, she has worked tirelessly to document hundreds of human rights abuses in the Kosovo region of the former Yugoslavia. She has published extensively, and collaborated with regional and international organizations and networks to promote greater protection for human rights across ethnic lines.

While her courageous work has focused on protection and rehabilitation and documentation of ethnic Albanian women and children victims of rape, torture and enslavement, she does not advocate nor practice discrimination based on ethnic origin, and has found treatment for many other human rights victims as well. The crimes carefully documented by Ms. Ahmeti and her colleagues have been used as evidence by the International Criminal Tribunal on Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Because of her outstanding record, Human Rights Watch chose Ms. Ahmeti as one of four Human Rights Monitors for 1999. The Oak Institute was honored to have Ms. Ahmeti join the Colby community to teach about her work and to share her on-the-ground perspective concerning human rights and civil war in the Balkans region.

Until passing away from an aortic aneurysm in 2006, Ahmeti was a board member of the Kosovo Women’s Network (KWN), which includes more than 143 women’s organizations and is directed by Rogova. “She was, to be honest, like my big sister,” she said.

To keep her memory and legacy alive, last year KWN started an annual Sevdije Ahmeti Prize for activists. They’re also in close contact with the municipality of Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, to name a street or a town square after Ahmeti. “We asked the president’s oce to give post mortem decoration to Sevdije Ahmeti for the work she did for Kosovan women and children,” said Rogova. Ahmeti’s book, Journal d’une Femme du Kosovo (The Diary of a Woman from Kosovo), will be published in Albanian. “She will be remembered always as a brave activist who never was scared of anyone.”

Learn More:

• Oral History Kosovo, Sevdije Ahmeti in Her Own Words, 2014