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Kosovo's last respects to Demaci, its human rights 'Mandela'

Human rights defender who embodied national resistance

27 July, 19:18
(ANSA-AP) - PRISTINA, JULY, 27 - Kosovo is paying its last respects to Adem Demaci, its human rights defender, or so-called "Kosovo's M andela," who embodied resistance against authoritarianism. Kosovo on Friday started a three-day mourning with flags at half-mast for Demaci, who died a day earlier of natural causes.

He was 82. Demaci's body was put at the parliament's hall where hundreds of people paid their last for the man who avoided supporting specific political parties for long, and remained critical of their leaders. Demaci was arrested three times and spent 28 years in jail for resisting then-Yugoslavia's communist regime. In 1991, he was a warded the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and in 2010 he received the order Hero of Kosovo. Demaci is survived by a wife, a son and a daughter.

(ANSA-AP).

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