Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

They came and said: “within half-an-hour you must leave the house”.
[Blerta]
They thought ours was an Albanian home… Ten days after the beginning
of the bombing… when they burned the houses, also the scrappers
came to tear them down… “If we find you here we will kill you all!”
[Ylber]
The deprived body
Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
To live for such long periods of time, in such a life threatening environment
also meant experiencing physical suffering related to deprivation:
hunger, thirst, lack of rest, cold, stress and displacement. Such hardship is
particularly difficult to bear in the presence of children (Goldson, 1996:
809-819; Gordon-Lennox, 1994; Ferrari and Scalettari, 1996):
We were not refugees, we were almost dead people: nothing to eat, nothing
to drink, nothing… Imagine a camping tent for four people: we were
15… and with the rain and snow, and rain… [Agim]
I had to work ten hours a day [for the Serbs] and then I couldn’t sleep
during the night because of the fear. [Rexhi]
We remained a few days on the mountain. We were always wet… Some
of us had lost their kids while running away. [Bahrije]
A further level of bodily-restraint and suffering involves forms of psychological
and physical torture perpetrated in incarceration, and horrendous
types of mutilation, some of which lead to death.
My brother was incarcerated... I don’t know how long they kept him tied
to the heater. [Agim]
They took us to a basement where there was no light, nothing, and you
couldn’t see anything. We lost the sense of time: we remained there for
38 hours. [Altin]
An 80-year-old woman, they put her on a cart… since the road was
uphill, they took her at the beginning and then they dropped her – and
when she arrived, she was already dead. She was 80 years old… they did
so to create fear among [us] the other Romany. [Blerta]
We saw civilians on television whose eyes have been pulled out by the
Serbian. [Altin]
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