The Paperwork of Trying to Stay Alive
On the murder of Arlinda Zekaj in Kosovo, and the institutions that were supposed to protect her.
Guest Blog Post by Eurisa Rukovci, Advocacy and Training Manager, World YWCA
In a recording made public this week in Kosovo, Arlinda Zekaj pleads with a police officer, asking him to do his job. She has been trying to get a court order enforced, and she is worried about her son who she has not seen for weeks. The officer tells her that he is exhausted from her and that it is not his obligation to help her. She warns him that she will be killed. He tells her that he has other people waiting and that he will no longer receive her personally.
I have listened to this exchange several times, and I cannot get over how arrogantly irritated he is. A woman is explaining that her life is in danger, and the man whose job involves responding to such dangers is annoyed that she keeps coming back.
He is tired of her. Imagine that.
On 25 October 2026, Arlinda was murdered in the house that she owned in Vitomiricë, near Peja, Kosovo. She had been escorted home by police that evening. Shortly after they left, she was killed. The suspect is her brother-in-law.
By then, she had reported threats, obtained protection orders, approached police and prosecutors, and written letters warning about the danger she faced. She had become remarkably proficient at the administrative work of trying to stay alive. I have spent the past several days reporting on her case through Grazeta, the feminist media platform I founded in Kosovo. One of our posts has been viewed more than four million times. I keep looking at that number and thinking about how many people are paying attention to Arlinda now, when the attention she needed while alive was practically nonexistent. She needed someone to enforce a court decision. She needed officials to take her warnings seriously. She needed to be able to live in her home with her son.
Apparently, that was an enormous amount to ask.
The labour that we expect from women who experience violence and threats to their life is tremendous. We tell them that apart from recognizing the red flags of abuse, they must report threats, they must collect evidence, they must seek protection orders, they must follow procedures, they must contact the appropriate authorities, they must, they must, they must.
I am uncomfortable even with the insistence that she did everything right. It implies that somewhere there is a woman who did something wrong, and that her death might therefore be easier to explain. We have built an impossible standard of victimhood, one in which women must be frightened enough to warrant protection but composed enough to request it correctly. Persistent, but never irritating. Knowledgeable about their rights, but sufficiently agreeable to the people responsible for enforcing them.
Arlinda knew her rights. She was persistent. She kept records. She asked questions.
And she was murdered.
For years, those of us working in women’s rights have encouraged women to break their silence, speak up, report violence and claim their rights. This work has been necessary, and it still is. But Arlinda’s murder has made me question whether we have become too comfortable placing the responsibility for preventing violence on the women experiencing it.
Arlinda did not lack a voice. She used it relentlessly.
In this regard, I worry that we have become better at teaching women how to demand their rights than at ensuring institutions are capable of delivering them. We celebrate women’s resilience, sometimes without asking why so much resilience is required in the first place.
There is a limit to what empowerment can accomplish when the people entrusted with public authority do not fulfil their obligations.
I have a young daughter, and I’m raising her to be vocal, to challenge authority, and to refuse to be intimidated. But each day, I am resenting more and more the idea that I must prepare her to become exceptionally strong and resilient simply to survive the society she was born into. I am tired of praising women for being resilient. We shouldn’t have to have so much resilience.
I would prefer we spent considerably more time making that society less dangerous. In one of her letters to judicial authorities, Arlinda wrote, in Albanian, that after her murder they would no longer be able to answer her, but that she expected them to lose sleep.
Her words have since made their way onto protest placards and into the streets of Kosovo.
The protesters are demanding that those responsible should have no peace.
I have been thinking about the cruelty of that. About a woman who understood the danger she faced so clearly that she was already contemplating the conscience of the people who might fail to prevent her death.
She should never have needed to write such a letter. And the fact that she did ought to trouble us far more than anything we might say about her courage, her persistence or her extraordinary ability to advocate for herself.