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These accounts were thus usually focused on the details of living conditions
in Serbian enclaves, descriptions that yielded causes and actors they
could blame for their individual and collective suffering. Such a testimony
was given by Dragan, an elderly teacher of Gorazdevac, a Serbian village
very close to Pec. According to him, before the war people could hold various
jobs in town and work in the fields only for their own consumption,
but the restrictions on movement beyond the village, which came after the
war, created a high rate of unemployment which could not be absorbed by
the area’s agriculture. As a village patriarch, Dragan expressed his worry
about the consequences of the situation: “There is no work, there is no
work and this is not good. What can young people do without work? They
don’t have anything to do. Without work there is no life, no peace.”
Dragan repeated this phrase many times: “No work, no life, no peace”, and
repeated it once more to end his conversation.
Another resident of Gorazdevac interviewed was Tamara, the 36-year-old
mother of three daughters. She began her story by bearing witness to the
gap between the reality she was forced to live and her desires:
The reality is practically the place where I’m living. That means the beehive.
I would like to go out of this limited place but reality is like this; I
am so sorry that I cannot allow myself to go out. My wish is to walk
freely. To go with my children to the parks, to the cinema, to be
employed. Just to walk freely without any feeling of fear.
Biljana, another interviewee, was 25 and worked for an international
organization in Mitrovica north. In describing how she spent her free time,
she told the interviewer how much she missed the cinema, but continued
on to say that these feelings were certainly common to most of the young
people living in town:
I guess I’m not the only one that would like so much to go to the cinema.
Life is not just working, eating and sleeping. We need something
else. Despite the fact that there is quite a lot of money around – because
of all the international organizations present here – people cannot have
the normal life we need. What is bothering me, in particular, as a person,
is just the lack of a normal life. Here, even if I earn a fortune, there is no
way... not to spend it, because you can always spend money, but to spend
it and to feel something... something fulfilling. No, it’s not just...
“Suffering in the soul”: a woman’s task
Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
To the Kosovar Serbs, suffering, as it appeared in their accounts, was most
often psychological, rather than “material”. International and non-governmental
organizations stationed in the Serbian enclaves were present to
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