Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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<strong>Psychosocial</strong> <strong>Notebook</strong>, Volume 2, October 2001<br />
began after the NATO bombings as well as the revenge enacted upon the<br />
Serbs by the Albanians immediately after the war, were considered merely<br />
the last phase of a much longer and continuous conflict. When did this<br />
conflict begin? On this issue, individual memory seems to step aside, leaving<br />
space for the official versions. The origin of the conflict is usually<br />
identified by Albanians as one of the historical events that led to the suppression<br />
of the Kosovar’s autonomy, and by the Serbs as the demonstrations<br />
organized by the Albanians as a reaction to this crackdown. 8 Yet<br />
these chronologies never seemed to correspond to the beginning of the<br />
conflict in the individuals’ daily life. For instance, in his account, Ismail<br />
told us that the struggle began when the constitution was changed (in<br />
1990) and Kosovo’s autonomy was abolished (Malcolm, 1998: 378-79),<br />
but the first event to have impacted him directly was a Serbian army’s<br />
attack on a neighbouring village in 1998. Milica, another (Serbian) interviewee,<br />
situated the rise in tension between the two communities in 1981,<br />
the time of the first large-scale demonstrations organized by Albanians, but<br />
could not specify a period when she herself experienced the conflict,<br />
explaining that she “lived in perfect harmony until the end of the war”,<br />
with her Albanian neighbours. This replacement of the individual memory<br />
with a collective one, structured as it is on specific historical, political and<br />
public events, is sometimes accompanied with changes in the chronological<br />
order in which these particular events occurred. For instance, when<br />
interviewed, Shyrhrete tracked the breakdown of Albanian relations with<br />
Serbs back to 1981, “when they expelled us from the schools” (she had<br />
been a teacher). In fact, however, the Serbians closed Albanian public<br />
schools and instituted the “parallel system” only ten years later (Malcolm,<br />
1998: 382-85). It seemed that memory tended to reach further back into<br />
the past for the origins of the conflict, and that the extra length of the suffering<br />
itself reinforced the influence of this distress in the construction of<br />
the collective identity. As Haretina, an old woman living in the orthodox<br />
patriarchate of Pec, said: “[It is] because now everybody blames Serbs<br />
but… Serbs in Kosovo suffered a lot during the Yugoslavia era… they<br />
were not protected, they were the minority, they suffered a lot…” Mirdita,<br />
another interviewee and the famous journalist/director of one of the most<br />
popular radio stations in Pristina, commented that:<br />
All that happened in Kosova didn’t happen in just one night, it happened<br />
over a long time. We suffered for a long time. And always in our society<br />
the first need was defence. Not to fight, but to defend. In the way that you<br />
always had to defend yourself from someone who was attacking you<br />
[…]. It’s not easy to define “Albanianship”, “Kosovarship”. You have to<br />
go back to that position of defence. Always we were defenders, we were<br />
used just to survive.<br />
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