Tahir Meha: the siege of Prekaz in 1981 and how it became a symbol

In Drenica, the names of Prekaz and the Jashari family are known to everyone. But long before 1998, another siege took place in the same village and left deep marks in the region’s memory. In May 1981 Tahir Meha and his father, Nebih Meha, held out in their house against Yugoslav security forces. Both lost their lives. Their story became a song, a family memory and, later, part of the account of the road that led to the KLA.

The Meha family

Tahir Meha was born on 10 October 1943 in Prekaz, in Drenica. His family had a long history of resistance. His grandfather, Emin Lati, had fought in the 1920s with the kaçaks of Azem Bejta, who resisted the rule of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. According to family tradition, Azem Bejta’s revolver stayed with the family and passed from generation to generation. His father, Nebih Meha, born in 1910, had taken part in the fighting in Drenica in 1944–1945, alongside Shaban Polluzha, against the Yugoslav partisan forces.

Tahir grew up in the post-war years, when the Albanians of Kosovo lived under the tight control of Aleksandar Ranković’s security services and when thousands of Albanian families emigrated to Turkey. These experiences were part of the shared memory of Drenica.

The spring of 1981

In March and April 1981 Albanian students demonstrated in Prishtina and other towns. The best-known demand was "Kosovo Republic". The Yugoslav state declared a state of emergency, brought in large police and army forces and began widespread arrests. In this tense atmosphere, every clash with the police immediately took on a political meaning.

The siege

On 13 May 1981 the police tried to arrest Tahir Meha in Prekaz. According to Albanian accounts, officers demanded that he hand over the revolver and he refused. An exchange of fire followed in which several police officers were wounded. Tahir withdrew to the family house, where his father joined him. The authorities sent large police units with armoured vehicles and helicopters. The siege lasted nearly a day. After several attempts to take the house, it was heavily shelled and its walls collapsed. Tahir and Nebih were killed. Several members of the security forces also died in the fighting; the exact number differs between sources. Tahir’s young sister was seriously wounded.

After the event the family house was completely demolished, and several family members were imprisoned. Tahir’s brother, Beqir, would fall years later, on 25 March 1999, as a KLA fighter.

In Drenica, the story of Tahir and Nebih was passed on by word of mouth, at a time when writing it down publicly was dangerous.

How it became a symbol

In the 1980s and 1990s, when the Albanians of Kosovo could not freely write their own history, the Prekaz event lived on in folk songs and family accounts. Many of those who later took up arms in Drenica remembered it as an example. After the war Tahir Meha was declared a Hero of Kosovo. The date of 13 May is commemorated every year in Prekaz, with institutions and veterans taking part. At the 2018 commemoration, the resistance of Tahir and Nebih was described as part of the national awakening and as a model for the generations that followed.

Two readings of the same event

Albanian historiography, such as the monograph by the historian Sabile Keçmezi-Basha published by the "Ali Hadri" Institute of History in 2015, treats the siege as part of a family and national resistance that lasted more than a century, from the kaçaks to the KLA.

An article published in 2022 in the Serbian journal Tokovi istorije, based on documents of the Yugoslav Presidency, gives a different interpretation. According to it, the police went to take Tahir to serve a sentence, the event had a local rather than a national character, and no political demands were raised during the siege. The author calls the heroic account a myth built later.

Readers should know both approaches. The police documents of a state that was suppressing demonstrations are not neutral sources, just as the accounts of songs and family memory are not entirely neutral either. What is not in dispute is that two men died in their home after a large siege, at a time when Kosovo was under a state of emergency, and that this event influenced the generation that came after.