Thirteen-year-old Petrit Halilaj's drawings of the Kosovo conflict where civilians were killed by soldiers give clues about how war impacts young minds. While art can motivate them, it can also be used as a propaganda tool.
Halilaj, now 36, has since become a successful artist and has revisited those drawings with a radical show for Britain's Tate and now at the Kamel Mennour Gallery in Paris – pulling his original pictures apart and blowing up elements into huge installations.
In the process, he tried to recall why he had ultimately refused to hand over the drawing he had prepared for Annan.
"At first, I thought this was my chance to stop the war. I was rushing to complete a big drawing before he arrived," Halilaj told Agence France-Presse (AFP) with a laugh.
It was, he thinks, his grandfather who cooled his excitement.
"My grandfather was almost annoyed by my enthusiasm – he couldn't deal with my joy in drawing the picture. He told me (Annan's visit) was just theatre," he recounted.
When Annan visited the camp in Albania, accompanied by the world's media, and asked if he could take the drawing to a major United Nations meeting, Halilaj said no.
"Maybe I was thinking about my grandfather's words," said Halilaj. "But maybe I just had a sense that this is my drawing and I wanted to keep it!"
The teenage Halilaj made the drawings under the supervision of an Italian child psychologist who was volunteering in the camp.
His experiences have obvious relevance as millions of children are again forced to flee a brutal European war, this time in Ukraine.
"In war, you learn to be afraid of strangers and the others. Only once I was in the camp did I learn to start connecting to strangers again and having art was so important as a way to express and share," he told AFP.
But his new show emphasizes the importance of being guided by a psychological expert.
Its co-curator, Amy Zion, said she was concerned to see pictures of Ukrainian children being used to depict the war in newspapers recently.
"It worried me that it could so easily become a journalistic trope," she told AFP.
"Petrit had a psychologist trained in working in traumatic situations who understood how to present the situation as therapy first and foremost, and not something to be instrumentalized," she said.
That is perhaps why many of the drawings did not feature violence, but rather peaceful scenes of nature and animals.
In revisiting them, Halilaj was fascinated to rediscover elements that suggested other issues stirring in his young mind.
