When internationals speak about "the war," they mean just the time of the NATO bombing. In Kosovo, the war is considered to begin in 1982 or 1989, when Milosevic took away Kosovo's autonomy and started doing the real discrimination, like when they fired all Albanian employees from public administration--the parliament, the schools, universities. The conflict started growing from that time, and it was 1995 when all this maybe reached its peak.
I was quite young at that time and I couldn't understand everything, but from the beginning I understood that, for instance, we are not allowed to go to school in a normal way, we have to use the back roads, you shouldn't show that you're Albanian because you might be stopped by police or other kinds of forces. We were raised in that way. It was not a normal life to live.
Read more of Liridon's story in Speaking Their Peace.