“I told my voters: “Vote me only if I, Donika, deserve your vote, because my father is not responsible for my sins,’” she added.Įnver Robelli, a Kosovo-born journalist working in Switzerland, said that after the 1998-99 war for independence from Yugoslavia, Gervalla-Schwarz became “a critical voice of the wrongdoings that took root in liberated Kosovo”. “I have a surname which is respected by many Kosovo citizens, but throughout my life I have tried to get people to evaluate me not based on my last name, but as Donika,” she said. Older people in Kosovo sometimes still refer to her as “Jusuf Gervalla’s daughter”, but the new foreign minister said she wants to be judged according to her own merits. She became a significant voice for Kosovo Albanians in the German media during 1990s but did not take on a prominent political party role until 2015, when she was elected head of the LDK’s branch in Germany.īut when she came to Kosovo, she was not allowed to participate in an LDK meeting as the head of the German branch, reportedly because she was critical of the LDK’s leadership at the time, and security dragged her away when she tried to enter the meeting. There she studied law, but also became involved in political activity as part of the Kosovo diaspora with the LDK, which at that time was perceived more as a popular movement than a typical political party. Months afterwards, her family moved to communist Albania when she stayed until 1992, when she returned to Germany in her early 20s with only $100 in her pocket, she recalled. “My father was the most lyrical person I have known in my life,” she said when asked to describe how she remembers him. They were allegedly murdered by the Yugoslav secret service, although the case remains unsolved. On January 17, 1982, Gervalla-Schwarz was hit by tragedy when her father, together with his brother Bardhosh and his fellow activist Kadri Zeka, were killed near his home in the German town of Untergruppenbach. Vetevendosje won more than 50 per cent of the vote and 58 MPs in the 120-seat parliament, soundly beating the country’s traditional ruling parties, the Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK, and her former party, the LDK. Gervalla-Schwarz won more than 71,000 votes, the fourth-largest tally among Vetevendosje candidates, and the party won the election by a landslide. She was speaking ahead of the parliamentary elections in Kosovo in February, in which she ran for office as part of a group of politicians led by Vjosa Osmani who had quit the Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK party and allied themselves with Kurti’s Vetevendosje (Self-Determination). “We went through a very difficult one-month period, with expressions of violence against my mother, and with scenes I would not want any child to experience,” she said. He was also a political activist, and the young Gervalla-Schwarz’s life was turned upside down in 1980 when her family had to migrate to Germany shortly after her father escaped arrest by the Yugoslav Police because of his involvement in campaigning for more rights for ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, which at that time was autonomous province within the Yugoslav republic of Serbia.īefore they left, the family were subjected to threats, Gervalla-Schwarz told BIRN in January. She spent her early childhood living between Skopje and Pristina, where her father, Jusuf Gervalla, was a well-known writer, singer and artist. Gervalla-Schwarz was born in North Macedonia capital, Skopje, in 1971, when it was still part of socialist Yugoslavia.
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