Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
If you moved from there, you were dead. [Bahrije]
On Italian television we could see when the aeroplane were leaving; then
by calculating the time of their arrival we knew when we had to go into
the basement… it was incredible because we were hiding ourselves also
with small children, as young as one-month-old, and we felt bad because
it was cold, all night. [Blerta]
We were hiding in the attic, because the police was going in the houses
to check if refugees had arrived, and if they could get them [us]….
[Ornela]
At this point, I believe a distinction should be made in the analysis of
narrations describing violations of the home. We might identify three
different steps, in order to understand to which degree the police and
other subjects were still acting “legally”, and the point when the law
became a broken and treacherous tool. The first step involves police
abuse during searches of houses for weapons, subversive materials and/or
militants:
The Serbian police was coming at midnight, they were breaking in, forcing
the door. They made children and women stand up, asking for
weapons that we didn’t have. [Ilir]
The inspectia [inspections]: when 20, 30 or 40 policemen come to your
home. They made more than 20 inspectias in our house. [Agim]
A next step, perceptible in the described experiences of the interviewees,
occurs when the violation of the home has lost any semblance of legality,
when they occur for the sole purpose of creating fear and spreading panic
within the targeted ethnic population. At this second step, we often find the
violator appropriating the narrator’s goods:
Albanians came into my home to take away my stuff… and one of them
placed a gun at my wife’s throat, so that nobody would intervene. [Ylber]
They came into the house, they said things… to my father they said “give
me your wife”. [Teuta]
A third step in the interviewees’ experience would occur when a violation
of the home is perpetrated with the aim of forcing the inhabitants to leave,
to abandon their home and the land.
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Albanians came in the night, and we were forced to run away. [Dritan]