Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
(as opposed to Albanians and Romany) was supposedly the lack of Serbian
solidarity. To others, the Christianity of some Kosovar Albanians did not
stand in the way of their reaching agreements with those who were of
Islamic faith, if they were also Albanians. They did not, however, extend
this same guarantee of good relations to the other Islamic minorities of the
region, such as the majority of Romany and Turks. Here again, however,
the language barrier put the Romany at a great disadvantage in a social
world dominated by Kosovar Albanians. Even the Romany whose mother
tongue was Albanian 6 and who still attended “parallel schools”, alongside
the Albanian children, aroused the suspicion of their companions and, in
some cases, suffered provocation and ill treatment.
The dispute surrounding language has therefore become one of the most
significant of the Kosovo crisis. The Albanian language was alternatively
silenced, or rose in protest to reaffirm its trampled rights or to express, by
means of its sound, the cultural identity of the parties in conflict:
…I went on the day for enrolment… so I went up to the school door
because that’s where they were doing the enrolling, and I said “Good
morning” in Albanian, I said “mirdita”, and he said “there’s no more
mirdita from now on. You’ve got to say dobar dan”, which is mirdita in
Serb. So I said “OK, if that’s the only way to get to study all right”, so I
say again “I’ve come to enrol” and he replies “I can see you’re stubborn
but don’t insist. I didn’t tell you there was no more ‘mirdita’ from today
just to say so but to make you understand that you’re not to insist: this
school isn’t for you and there’s no place for you here. Don’t insist
because there’s the police over there.” The police was there and I thought
they were there just for normal checks, on duty on patrol, normal things,
but they were there for us. [Gjolek]
In such short alignments of sentences, various images of “enemy”
appeared: the contemptuous boys waiting in front of a school, the public
employee, or the policeman. The accounts were anything but univocal.
The country dwelling Serbian enemy was different from that of the town.
The enemy was constructed differently, also, in the memories of young
people and adults, students and workers, men and women. Again, it should
be emphasized that these distinctions refer to the enemy that each person
has constructed and faced, through contemplation, through real experiences,
or through the image disseminated by the vox populi. The “real” differences
between self and enemy, or those presumed to be so, were not
definable in the accounts. With each narrative emerging from memories of
different events occurring in different settings, there were scenes played by
characters who could be described through the traditional dichotomy
”people A against people B”.
161