Although during his career he was used to the darkness of the mining shaft, Šućuri Sadiku did not expect that he would have to sleep deep underground - for days at a time.
This is exactly what happened to him in February 1989, when the workers of the Trepča mining complex, not far from Kosovska Mitrovica, went on hunger strike.
"It was a historic strike, the first with political elements," Sadiku told the BBC in Serbian.
"It was very difficult, but we were united and did not give in."
With a mass hunger strike, the miners of Trepča opposed the constitutional changes within the then Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) and the announcement of the abolition of the autonomy of Kosovo, against the wishes of the majority Albanian population.
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According to some assessments, then about 1.200 people were underground for seven days.
"It was the first open rebellion against Slobodan Milošević," says Azem Vlasi, a former high-ranking state and party official from Kosovo in the SFRY, for the BBC in Serbian.
"Yugoslavia was defending itself in Kosovo then," he added shortly.
Milošević, later the president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, then as the first man of the League of Communists of Serbia gained popularity and power precisely on the Kosovo issue.
After the abolition of the autonomy of Vojvodina in the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution, he wanted the same in Kosovo.
But his intention was met by mass protests of the Albanian population.
Momčilo Trajković, the then executive secretary of the Union of Communists in Pristina, nevertheless believes that the goal of the hunger strike and the Albanian protest was "separatist".
"It was the final decision to resist Milosevic's policy, which ultimately ended in an armed conflict," Trajkovic told the BBC in Serbian.
"They played that political game better than our side."
How the protest came about
February 1989 and February 1974, although only a quarter of a century apart, and how they are connected.
And important for the fate of the former SFRY.
In February 1974, Yugoslavia received a new Constitution that gave Vojvodina and Kosovo, two autonomous provinces within Serbia, broad powers.
Nevertheless, in the early 1980s, Albanians took to the streets of Pristina, chanting "Kosovo - republic" and demanding even wider rights.
The protest was stopped by arrests, the introduction of a state of emergency and a curfew.
A new storm came at the end of the eighties, when Yugoslavia was plagued by an economic crisis.
The remedy was seen in constitutional changes.
"This, first of all, related to changes aimed at opening the way for economic reforms," says Vlasi, at that time a member of the Central Committee of the Union of Communists of Yugoslavia.
"However, in Serbia, they pushed for changes within Serbia."
The political leadership of Serbia at the time was unhappy that Serbia was the only one of the six republics to have two autonomous provinces with very broad powers.
And it goes out into the streets again.
First of all, Serbs in Kosovo, dissatisfied with their status, but also other workers throughout Serbia, demanding higher salaries and responsibility of long-term officials.
Milosevic called these processes the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution.
The first leadership of Vojvodina, then of Montenegro, was replaced, and personnel loyal to Milošević were appointed.
The Serbian leader thus gets more support in the Presidency of the SFRY, which ruled the country after the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980.
"Milošević then started reshaping Yugoslavia," says Vlasi.
In November 1988, Vlasi was removed from the post of president of the Union of Communists of Kosovo, the ruling political organization in the province, then a branch of the Union of Communists of Serbia, because he opposed the abolition of the autonomy of Kosovo.
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Protest
Several dozen miners from Trepča, one of the largest and most important mines in the former Yugoslavia, gathered on February 20, 1989 in a cafe in Kosovska Mitrovica.
Among them was 25-year-old Šućuri Sadiku, then the supervisor of the first shift.
They were afraid, he says, that the authorities wouldn't discover them, so they did everything in secret.
A decision was made to go on a hunger strike in the mine shaft.
"It started as a miners' strike because of the hard life and difficult conditions of mining, but it also had political demands, it was against the repression of the Milosevic regime," says Sadiku today.
Vlasi describes the strike as "the culmination of mass protests by Kosovo Albanians who defended the legal constitutional position of Kosovo".
"We didn't ask for anything more than what was written in the Constitution, and the miners made demands, none of which were anti-systemic or anti-Yugoslav.
"They wanted Kosovo to have the right to choose its own leadership, like everyone else."
Among other things, the miners demanded the resignation of three senior party leaders in Kosovo, loyal to Milošević: Alija Šukrija, Husamedin Azemi and Rahman Morina.
Vlasi points out that the Albanians then turned to Yugoslavia for the last time to protect them, but everyone was "minding their own business".
The only support, he says, was from Slovenia.
"Then I said that the miners in Stari trg are defending Yugoslavia," he said earlier Milan Kučan, the first president of Slovenia, for the BBC in Serbian.
"They urged that the autonomy of Kosovo, guaranteed by the national and republican constitutions, should be respected, and the abolition of that autonomy was being prepared."
On February 27, 1989, a gathering of support for the miners of Stari trg was held in Ljubljana, where representatives of both the government and the opposition in Slovenia participated together.
"The miners in Trepča were supported by the creators of the separatist process in Yugoslavia, for whom it all suited them in order to achieve their goals," believes MomčiloTrajković, the Serbian Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Kosovo in the early 1990s.
"Albanian separatism was only an instrument for them, they did not love Albanians, nor were they worried about them."
Trajković calls the protests in Kosovo, including the miners' hunger strike in Trepča, "separatist forces wrapped in communist ideology".
"Powerlessness" is what he particularly remembers from the hunger strike period.
"First, because you know what it's about, that these people were used for political purposes, but on the other hand, their lives were still at stake."
However, he says that "the miners themselves agreed to it", because "the entire (Albanian) people were indoctrinated to achieve that goal".
"They were ready to sacrifice."
The end and the arrests
When the sealed resignations of the three communist leaders arrived on February 27, the miners ended their strike.
However, a day later, the Union of Communists of Serbia revoked those resignations.
"They betrayed us," Sadik says shortly.
12 miners were arrested, along with the Vlachs.
They were accused of counter-revolutionary action, separatism, nationalism, as well as of destroying the brotherhood and unity of Yugoslavia.
At the beginning of March 1989, a state of emergency was introduced in Kosovo.
"That was like the beginning hunting season", says Vlasi.
The repression against the Albanians was "all-round and difficult", he says.
"Milošević reckoned that he could do whatever he wanted in Kosovo - and he did."
Amendments to the Constitution of the SR Serbia, which deprived the provinces of their veto power over constitutional changes in Serbia, were adopted on March 28, 1989 in Belgrade.
The revision was accompanied by mass demonstrations in Kosovo, in which there were also deaths - 22 demonstrators and two policemen.
"The Serbian authorities then took over all the institutions in Kosovo, which is why the Albanians had to act outside the system," says Vlasi.
As a form of resistance to the abolition of autonomy, Kosovo Albanians establish parallel institutions, primarily in the fields of health and education.
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The disintegration of Yugoslavia soon began.
Slovenia declares independence, followed by Croatia, where the war begins, which then spills over into multi-ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it gains the most terrible momentum.
The war eventually reached Kosovo, when in 1998 and 1999 there was a conflict between the Serbian security forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
"After the miners' strike, the whole of Yugoslavia, and much wider than it, found out what the Milosevic regime was doing in Kosovo and why the Albanians were rebelling," Vlasi believes.
"Slovenes and Croats realized that there is no future in a joint state with him and today we are all where we are, which is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of that miners' strike."
Sixten years after the declaration of independence, Kosovo was recognized by about 100 countries. However, the exact number is not known.
Pristina cites a figure of 117 countries, and in Belgrade they say that there are far fewer.
Among the countries of the European Union that have not recognized Kosovo are Spain, Slovakia, Cyprus, Greece and Romania, and when it comes to world powers, they are Russia, China, Brazil and India.
Since 2008, Kosovo has become a member of several international organizations, such as the IMF, the World Bank and FIFA, but not the United Nations.
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