Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

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