Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
At school, the first relevant encounters occurred within the Serbian institutions,
(or at least, the first encounter mentioned in the interviews, and
most vividly recounted, did). The first instance of organized and collective
violence, told either by eyewitnesses or by participants, occurred during
the school year and directly concerned education. In fact, the topic of
school became important to the interviews, in that its standardized progression
helped put order to the memories, providing a timeline against
which broader events could be situated.
These tales of student protest were not limited to the collective story, the
Kosovar Albanian demand for a return to their autonomy, but to many
individual memories, from the students’ initiation into groups and their
discovery of teamwork and solidarity, to a taste of shared experiences.
Further, in subsequent years, the student protests became one of the events
that helped place in context and explain the Serbian crackdown, which was
aimed, precisely, at the educational institutions.
In 1989 I was in the fourth class of middle school, the fourth year of
lyceum and the 12th of school; and 1989 was the year when things
changed, alas for the worse, I was in the penultimate generation that finished
school in the normal way, the one after mine also, while the one
after that had to leave school because the police did not let them enter the
schools, for the reason that we, the Albanian schools, would not accept
the programme prescribed by the Serbian government: that is, for
instance; in history, we had to study all Serb writers and Serb history
without mentioning our history, to which we feel very tied, the programme
was unfavourable to us; it was done on purpose, so that we
would refuse it, to find an excuse to shut down the schools; they saw our
schools as a powerful weapon, our university has existed since 1970, and
in those 19 years very many intellectuals were born, before the seventies
we did not have any, only here or there someone had studied abroad, in
Belgrade or Zagreb, but nobody of our mother-tongue; in these 19 years
many things changed for the better; and then came the intellectual resistance,
books were written, and the Serbs started to be afraid and so from
then on the target was mainly the university; and in fact in 1989 they succeeded
in their intention to close it, even though the university continued
to work in private homes, just like elementary and middle schools.
[Altin]
On the occasion of the first student protests, or around the same time,
police brutality was also concentrated upon other protesters, like factory
workers and the miners who began to protest in 1981. This also fuelled the
students’ anger:
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I started to hate Serbs, in 1981, when I saw them repressing the workers.
[Margherita]