Petrit Halilaj: ‘I started to live with fear on a daily basis’

The artist was 12 when the Kosovo war destroyed his home, but a chance meeting in a refugee camp led him to document a child's-eye view of the conflict

Petrit Halilaj was 12 years old when Serbian troops moved into his Kosovar village, forcing his family to flee and then burning their house to the ground. Piling as much as they could on to a tractor, they took off for his grandfather's home. When that was also invaded they moved again, flitting from refuge to refuge until they arrived at a camp in Albania, where they sat out the rest of the 15-month war between Serbia and Kosovo.

It was there, in the spring of 1999, that Halilaj met up with the Italian psychologist who was to change his life. News reached the tent (in which he was living with his mother, grandfather and four siblings) that Giacomo Angelo" Poli was giving out paper and felt-tip pens to any child who wanted to draw. Before long he was pouring out images so powerful that the then UN secretary general Kofi Annan asked to meet him during a visit to the camp.