Kosovo is one of the countries that has changed the most from the countries I visited after the war”, says the photojournalist of “The New York Times”, Alan Chin, who had taken the well-known photo at the funeral of Ali Paçarizi, the KLA fighter, in September 1998. While recalling the work he had done in Kosovo at that time, he emphasized that there is now a lot of freedom for journalists compared to previous years.

In a conversation at Reporting House, Chin, while recounting the challenges he encountered during his journey, told about the terrible events he had seen in Kosovo.

Chin also remembered the terrible events he saw in Kosovo.

“And then Kosovo, 1997. So this is that last protest… We knew we knew that there was something going on in Kosovo, and in fact, actually before this, I think the night before this, or the supplements before this there happened a silent protest at night on the main street right here. Do you remember that? There were people standing quietly and they were not talking or anything, it was just to show up and we knew this was happening, and we knew that the students were also going to do a non-violent protest, and we thought, okay, let’s go see what happens. So we actually and again just to tell you how naive we were, we drove down from Belgrade… our translator was actually half Croatian half Serbian student who was very active in the student movement in Belgrade. We had no idea like actually a good idea even though he was one of the good guys and didn’t matter because people on the street are not going to know if you’re a good Serb or a bad Serb or an indifferent Serb, like we didn’t think about it, we still thought ‘oh Ivan is great, he’s not a regime guy’, he later became one of the activists… When the things got more big then all the big media came and all the more official people came… and then of course, we know what happened, the Serbian police started to beating everybody up without any warning, I think I forgot how many people were beaten, but it was a lot, and it was pretty bad , Chin said.

While talking about the war in Kosovo, he told about many pictures taken here.

“And even in the war in Kosovo, we usually we would shoot between two and 10 rolls of film a day or sometimes even more, if it was crazy. I remember arriving in Kosovo with I think 60 or 80 roll of film in my bag, and, you know, and each trip was maybe a few weeks or a month, and many times I would run out and luckily there were wonderful photography labs here that we were able to buy more film…  And that summer of 1995, we were looking at pictures from Srebrenica,… we were looking at pictures from Sarajeva and … and just all horrible stuff happening in Bosnia and Croatia and so on. And while I was looking at these pictures I was thinking what am I doing here in New York? Looking at these pictures, you know, in this air conditioned office, I should be there, I should be making these pictures… I ended up taking a bus for about 12 hours from Zagreb to Sarajeva. The war has just ended but I spent a lot of time… but it actually turned out to be a good practice”, said Chin.