Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai
… People came with masks on their faces, forcing Albanians out [of their
shops], which hurt them most, let me tell you, that forcing them out of
their houses. They wouldn’t let them, I saw that personally, put on their
shoes on their feet, but they forced them to go barefoot. Now, who these
people were, nobody can tell, or dare tell. I said to one, “Why are you
doing it like that, they are people too. Let them take something if they
need to.” “You mind your business, and don’t meddle or you will go with
them.” And of course, I could not say a thing any more. I saw that they
were not the army, that they were not the police, who they were, who
came there, I don’t know. [(G22) Serb woman, aged 60. The interviewee
had a university degree, had come from an urban environment, and had
experiences of friendship with Albanians].
Question: You mentioned the volunteers. What was their role?
Wife: Bad, they did most of…
Husband: Well look, both the Shiptars and the Serbs were afraid of the
volunteers. I have an example, when I was mobilized and
the village I was sent to was filled with the volunteers, they
are…
Wife: They are worse than Shiptars.
Husband: People locked themselves into their houses, that was how
afraid they were, because they heard that from other villages
that the volunteers come, drink a lot, shoot, and do things. I
was in that village, you couldn’t hear a shot; but in my village,
there was shooting all the time and problems of all
sorts.
Wife: A crazy Russian was throwing bombs around, constantly
drunk. Nobody could go out. ---- village suffered much from
the volunteers, and that is why they [Albanians] burned it
down, those Serb houses, churches, they destroyed them all.
There were cases of rape and burning the houses and robbery
and such things. A volunteer, it is known what he does,
the worst. And the active army, normally, like any other
army, did nothing of the sort.
[(G20): Young married couple from a suburban context, they were both
employees before having to flee Kosovo. They feel that responsibility for
the situation in Kosovo is to be sought at a political level].
The main purpose of this set of questions was to register the convergence
or gaps between the events as they were actually experienced, and the narratives
provided by the various political and social actors who participated
in, interpreted and even created these events. The majority of persons
interviewed found a need to “make sense” of scattered events and
emotions. Each of them, in different ways, tried to understand and explain
to themselves why, in their own words, “the things that happened to them
happened to them”. Some found a “culprit” or “culprits” and placed all of
the responsibility on them, others had fatalistic inclinations and attributed
their displacement and the loss of Kosovo to the destiny of the Serbian
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