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