As violence continues throughout Kosovo, Lulezon (24) is about to sit his final exams in computer science and telecommunications. However, as one of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians who make up 90 per cent of the province's population, his university education has been far from ordinary.
As large parts of Pristina's official university campus lay idle, Lulezon has been attending lectures in private houses in the town for the past three years. In 1991 up to 1,000 Albanian professors and teaching assistants, 200 administrative workers and 27,000 students were forcibly expelled from the university buildings by Serbian police. The same happened in schools.
Their offence had been to continue teaching and studying through the Albanian language, ignoring Serbian President Milosevic's 1991 edict that from then on teaching at the university would be conducted in Serbo-Croat (they call it Serbian since the break-up of Yugoslavia). Constantly alarmed by the massive Albanian majority in his southern province, Mr Milosevic sought to advance Serbian culture there and repress the Albanian culture as much as possible.
However, since the 1991 mass expulsion the teachers and students have continued their classes in private houses, styling themselves as the University of Pristina while campaigning to be allowed return to the old premises. Only Serb students, many from outside Kosovo, have been using the official university buildings.
In September 1996, responding to international pressure, an agreement was signed between Mr Milosevic and Mr Rugova, the Kosovan Albanian political leader, to allow Albanian students back in to learn in their own language.
The agreement was not implemented, but was signed again in March as Mr Milosevic attempted to appease international concern at his latest crackdown on the ethnic Albanians. To date, however, just one building has been opened to Albanians - that housing Lulezon's faculty, electrotechnology.
Officially made available to Albanian students on May 15th, it stands now as testimony to Serb resistance to such compromises. All the equipment has been removed from laboratories which are now empty, unused rooms. "They took it all with them," says Lulezon. "They decided they would rather take the laboratory apart than allow us to use it."
The deal was to create an extraordinary educational apartheid, with the Albanian students using the premises in the morning and the Serbs in the afternoon. The hours were to be reversed every six months.
Serb students set up a student resistance movement to oppose the changes on the grounds that education in Serbia should be conducted in Serbian. It is exam time now, and none of their representatives could be contacted in Pristina yesterday.
Mihane (25) is studying to be a teacher. Before that she also studied electrotechnology and hopes to go on to study psychosexuality. The university grossly overproduces graduates - few find employment locally and so many move from course to course. Funds from the Albanian diaspora help keep the university and individual students financially afloat.
She agrees that the standards at the university are questioned by some, but says universities in Berlin, Vienna, Tirana, Ljubljana and elsewhere have agreed to admit its graduates into post-graduate courses, thus giving them more internationally recognised qualifications.
She does not need high-tech facilities for her studies, but says the issue has moved beyond the demand for the return of the university buildings. "The whole military situation makes it very difficult to learn. It affects us too much."
Many students say the situation has changed radically in the last few months since the latest Serb crackdown. Students have been to the fore in daily demonstrations by ethnic Albanians in the streets of Pristina.
"Our level of education is at around 80 per cent of what it was before," claims Albin Kurti, an officer of the Students' Independent Union of the University of Pristina. "But the war is spreading fast and whether we get more buildings back is less important now."
He insists that the students' union has a policy of non-violence, but renders his statement fairly meaningless by adding that the problems in Kosovo can no longer be solved by non-violence.
Posters from last year in the student union offices demand simply a "University of Kosova [the Albanian spelling of the province's name]". Recent posters say "Drenica [the area where recent Serbian killings took place] we are with you". The double-headed black eagle, the symbol of the Kosovan independence seekers, is on the wall. There is a picture of a Kosovo Liberation Army man posing with a gun.
"There is now a huge empathy with the KLA," says one student who does not want to be named. "We are concerned about Kosovo's independence now, not our university rooms."