Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
and upon leaving town for visits with family members or friends. In the
second phase, the individual is restricted from attending school, and from
circulating freely within the same town or village or any area lying in
proximity to the home. The third phase of restrictions involves a higher
level of risk: deaths begin to occur and it becomes dangerous even to go
outdoors or to attend a funeral. The fourth phase of restraints and limitations
refers to a situation that has deteriorated even further, when ethnic
cleansing or aerial bombing force entire families to live underground and
in basements where deaths continue to occur. At this point, even one’s
home begins to become a place of no safety.
Now we will listen, from the voice of the interviewees, to statements that,
by painting the four different scenarios in strong and vivid colours, illustrate
the progression from one phase to another in a world of ever constricting
space and time. Sometimes the interviewees speak of themselves
as active objects, referred to as “them” “the Albanians”, “the Romany”,
instead of using “us”. This is how they chose to distance themselves
psychologically from their own experiences, when reviving an event they
knew to be traumatic.
Phase one: restrictions of job-related commuting from one city to another,
and of exiting town for visits with family members or friends:
For example: if I went from one town to another, they would block me,
stopping me in my car more than ten times. Road blocks, like during
wartime, started again. [Agim]
Albanians were pushed away from their jobs by the Serbians, so they
gave [us] Rom the possibility of working in their place… But then, when
the Albanians saw them [us] in the commuting, they did wait [for us] to
beat somebody up. [Musa]
Everywhere you went, you went with fear… always there was fear,
because of the troop movements. [Alketa]
Phase two: restrictions in the freedom to circulate within a same town or
village (attending school, for instance) or any area in proximity to home:
174
There was no curfew, but if you walked two meters [behind the corner]
that you didn’t walk the day before, you ran into the police and they beat
you up. [Gezim]
You didn’t have the freedom to go out and do things you liked. [Ilir]
I was in the market with my mommy, and the Serbian police came, they
took everything that was on sale by the Albanians and threw it all on the