Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici
provide indispensable items in order to satisfy at least the basic needs of
the population, and at the same time they offered opportunities for
employment, but the conversations on suffering tended to describe a different
void. This absence was identified as the cause of the affliction, grief
and anguish that permeated the Kosovar Serbian daily experience. The
void thus became brick and mortar to the construction of their collective
self-representation, as is evidenced by Tamara’s words: “Yes, psychological
disturbances are very common, we all suffer from this situation
here in Gorazdevac”, she said. Milica, another interviewee, similarly
referred to the situation in Mitrovica: “All here have this anguish and… I
saw people that have been disturbed, mentally disturbed because of it… I
saw them in the street”, she said. In her narrative, Tanja presented her living
conditions in Pristina as particularly difficult, but then immediately
extended this same experience to all the Serbs living in the region:
Here in Pristina the space of movement is very limited, is really very limited.
Home, the way to go to the place of work. Just a few hundreds
metres, nothing else. It’s really claustrophobic… but it’s true that also in
the enclaves people don’t have better conditions… they also suffer a lot
because of the limited space of movement.
Thus elevated to an experience common to all of the Serbs still living in
Kosovo, the psychological suffering acquired the characteristics of an
endemic illness, the evidence of which would emerge as physical symptoms:
Tamara described how she had lost almost 20 kilos since the end of
the war so that even her friends could not recognize her. Biljana complained
of continuous stomach pains due to gastritis, and Tanja spoke of a
chronic headache. The psychological suffering was more often felt by
female interviewees and its “somatization” seemed to be experienced
mainly by women. In Gorazdevac, women constituted 78 per cent of the
360 patients given medical assistance by the KFOR between March and
June 2000, for diseases due to stress, depression and hypertension. 4 This
phenomenon is often explained, both by the local community and the medical
staff, as a consequence of the women’s domestic isolation. According
to Lazar, our translator: “Women [of the village] stay at home all day, they
think all day long about their situation, they have less opportunity to
relieve [their thoughts]”.
This reason, however, did not apply to the routines of men and women of
Gorazdevac. Tamara, for instance, had been a housewife even before the
war, and would care for her children and tend to their home. Even after the
war, when she could no longer go into town to run errands and visit friends
or relatives (some of her neighbours had in fact fled to Serbia), Tamara still
had a social network. She had not entirely lost the stable pattern of her life
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