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UÇKHistory and Memory
Life: ? – 17 January 1982

Memorial profile · Political leaders

Kadri Zeka

Kadri Zeka was an Albanian political activist from the Gjilan region, involved in the student movement and later in the political organization of the Albanian diaspora in Switzerland and Germany. On 17 January 1982 he was killed near Stuttgart together with the brothers Jusuf and Bardhosh Gërvalla. His name became part of the memory of the political movements of the 1980s; the public university in Gjilan bears his name today.

Source basis

Academic monographs; detailed biographical data await verification against Albanian archival sources.

Stone bust on a plinth inscribed “Kadri Zeka”, with flowers laid on it.
Bust of Kadri Zeka in front of the Radio Kosova building, photographed on 1 May 2020.Photo: Arianit · 2020-05-01 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Zeka belonged to the generation of activists who, after the repression of the 1970s and of 1981, tried to organize underground Albanian groups in exile [1].

As with Jusuf Gërvalla, the killing is widely attributed in the literature to the Yugoslav state security service, but the archive does not present the attribution as judicially established without such a source [2].

Photographs

Bronze bust on a stone plinth in a square in front of the theatre building.
The bust of Jusuf Gërvalla in front of the city theatre in Peja. Photograph taken in August 2018.Photo: Shkurte ramushi · 2018-08-18 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Sources

  1. [1]Noel Malcolm. Kosovo: A Short History. HarperPerennial, New York (botim i përditësuar); botimi i parë: Macmillan, Londër, 1998, 1999. https://archive.org/details/kosovoshorthisto0000malc. Accessed 2026-09-16.
  2. [2]James Pettifer. The Kosova Liberation Army: Underground War to Balkan Insurgency, 1948–2001. Hurst Publishers, Londër, 2014-01. https://hurstpublishers.com/book/the-kosova-liberation-army-2/. Accessed 2026-09-16.

Editorial status: Awaiting verificationDrafted from the cited sources; not yet fully reviewed by the editors.

Last reviewed:

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