As a 13-year-old refugee from the conflict in Kosovo in 1999, his felt-tip pen drawings of soldiers killing civilians were singled out by then-UN secretary general Kofi Annan as a powerful depiction of the war's impact on young minds.
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 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."
When Annan visited the camp in Albania, accompanied by the world's media, and asked if he could take the drawing to a major UN 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.
"In war, you learn to be afraid of strangers and the other. 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 ad share," he told AFP.
But his new show emphasises the importance of being guided by a psychological expert.
"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 really understood how to present the situation as therapy first and foremost, and not something to be instrumentalised."
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.
He highlights the huge colourful peacock that now dominates the exhibition space in Paris.
"I had more going on inside than just the war."
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