Fatmire Feka

  • Kosovo
  • Human Rights

Fatmire Feka is an Albanian peace activist based in Kosovo. She is the founder of Kids Club For Peace movement, a program created to promote conflict resolution, reconciliation, and peace among the children and young adults of Kosovo.

As a child, Fatmire was directly impacted by the growing violence against the Serbian-inflicted violence against the nation’s population of Muslim Albanians during the Kosovo War. In the spring of 1999, Serbian troops began to round up Muslim Albanian in Fatmire’s village for execution. Fatmire and her family fled into the woods as their house burned and gunshots rang out in the distance. She would then lose her brother and sister soon after while trying to escape north. While the war ended later that year, Fatmire, just 11 years old, found herself living in a camp  with other families who had been displaced by the war. Fatmire became interested in peace-building thanks to the reconciliation projects at the camp run by the staff of a humanitarian group called World Vision. Just after turning 12 and with World Vision’s support, Feka founded “Kids Clubs for Peace”, a club that uses meetings, skits and songs to bring youth from all of the different ethnicities in Kosovo together. Feka’s message of reconciliation was difficult for some of her fellow Muslims to hear and she often faced harsh criticism from her own people. Nevertheless, Fatmire persisted in her efforts.


Feka and her younger sisters would eventually emigrate to Toronto, Canada though she continues her peace work for her homeland in Kosovo and has expanded the Kids Club for Peace movement to 14 multi-ethnic clubs in English, Albanian, and Serbian languages to promote tolerance and understanding of ethnicity, race, and religion in conflict zones. Among her accolades, Fatmire has been selected as an Angel of Hope by the World Vision Canada, and in 2015, Feka was named one of the “1000 women of peace across the Globe”, a group collectively nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Kosovo

  • Population
    1,883,018
  • Capital
    Pristina
  • GDP (PPP)
    $10,134
  • February 17 2008
  • Total Area
    10,908 km2
  • Demonym
    Kosovar, Kosovan
  • Government
    Parliamentary republic

Artwork

Fatmire’s portrait is represented in the likeness of the ‘Goddess on the Throne’ - one of the most precious archaeological artifacts of Kosovo. The seated terracotta figure represents a female deity and is dated to 5700–4500 BC. It has become the symbol of the of both the Kosovo museum and Kosovo’s capital city of Pristina.

  • Illustration by
    Johnny Selman