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