Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
pulsory schooling, he attended a professional school for three years. He
arrived in Italy in the fall of 1998, after having fought with the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA). He left the KLA after the Serbian Federal Army’s
offensive in the Drenica region.
Ornela and Teuta have also come to live in the area near Lake Viverone.
They are two young women [age: 20 and 19 respectively], both married to
Kosovar Albanians and mothers of children born during their stay in Italy.
Also from the Suva Reka region, they are Muslim, and both of them have
attended school for the eight years required by law. Ornela hopes to be able
to live close to her parents, who migrated to Germany several years ago.
This distance from their loved ones has lasted for both women since the
early 1990s, causing them discomfort and suffering.
Ilir [age: 25, male] lives in the Provincial capital, Turin. A Muslim from
Jakovica, he attended the University of Pristina for two years. He is alone
in Italy, as all of his relatives have migrated to Germany. Like Altin and
other young people from Kosovo, Ilir has had to abandon his studies as
well as his prospects for the future, at least for the time being. Life in Turin
is even harder than life outside the provincial capital: work is insecure and
it is difficult to establish social relationships. In small areas, acquaintances
are more easily made because of the close structure of village communities,
which connect families and neighbourhoods to one another.
Lombardy, Northern Italy
The Kosovar Albanian community in the Lecco area contains hundreds of
people, including dozens of families. A great many of these, especially
those who arrived before the war of 1999, come from the traditionally
Catholic Stubla region. One of the guiding spirits and founders of the local
Kosovar association is Eduard B. [age: 53, male]. He has been in Italy
since the end of the 1960s, has lived in Lecco since the mid-1970s and has
been awarded a degree in Philosophy from an Italian University. Since the
1990s, during a time of intense emigration and flight from Kosovo, Eduard
B. and some of his peers have set up a network of reception and information
services run by Kosovars, with the help of Italian groups and associations,
to assist the arriving émigrés.
Arben B. [age: 48, male, living in Italy since 1993] is also from Stubla,
where he had been the headmaster of a primary school for many years until
the authorities had him dismissed in the late 1980s. He first studied in
Kosovo, where he later attended the University of Pristina in the 1970s.
These years were generally remembered as a time of cultural rebirth in
Kosovo, when universities were autonomous and remarkably open.
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