When she realised that she risked being arrested, Gashi hid with relatives in villages and towns across Kosovo. She says she even slept in cemeteries to evade the authorities, but also so as not to endanger her family and friends.
She was eventually arrested in April 1983 when she went home and was charged with separatist activities aimed at the destruction of Yugoslavia. She was sentenced to two years in prison.
“It was very difficult because, as well as the imprisonment, for a good part of my life I couldn’t enjoy the right to be free and continue my studies, my career, or be close to my family and the people I love,” she remembers.
Gashi endured brutal conditions in prisons in Pristina, Mitrovica, and Lipjan/Lipljane. She was interrogated and tortured.
“I consistently refused to talk about my actions. An investigator stubbed out a cigarette on my eyebrow and I lost consciousness. There were times when you saw how people had lost their minds from torture, and their lives, too,” she says.
While serving her sentence, her closest collaborator and lover, Nuhi Berisha, was killed in 1984.
But even in prison, Gashi says, she “never neglected my efforts for gender equality.
“On the contrary, I strongly advocated it with maximum commitment and would say with passion that we girls and women prisoners should not waste our time [in jail] but prepare to make efforts to achieve gender equality within the struggle for national equality by becoming part of the movements of the time.”
After her release, she says, “the injustice against me continued”. She was denied a passport for more than a decade after leaving jail.
Even after she did get a passport, it was later seized by police in 1997, when she was on a journalistic trip to what was then Macedonia. “Of course, they never returned it to me,” she says.
Despite everything she endured, however, Gashi is modest about her time in prison, reflecting that other campaigners for freedom for Kosovo Albanians were treated far more harshly.
“I am one of those who served one of the shortest jail terms. I was in prison for two years. There were others who served even more than this,” she concludes.