In April 1994, 18-year old Arian Curri was arrested by Serb police. “Two police officers entered the bus and began to check our identity cards… one of the officers suddenly grabbed me by the hair and pulled me out of the bus. They took [me] to the police station… and then the beating and torture began. One of the police officers pulled out a knife and cut a cross [on my chest] with the Cyrillic ‘S’.”

Eighteen-year-old Arian Curri, an ethnic Albanian arrested by police officers in Kosovo in April 1994.

The “S” is part of a slogan which, translated, means “only unity saves the Serb”. Arian Curri’s horrific scars are a reminder of how much the issues of ethnic identity and human rights violations have come to be intertwined in Kosovo.

The ethnic Albanian community makes up more than 90 per cent of Kosovo’s population. For nearly 20 years, the mounting calls from within the community for the region’s secession from Yugoslav rule have been met with increasingly draconian measures on the part of the authorities.

Source: Amnesty International