Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici<br />
Returning to the classmates of the Meto Bajraktari school, we find the<br />
memory of leisure re-emerging when the conversation focused on the relationship<br />
between past and present, and on perspectives for the future. At<br />
this point, their narratives demonstrated how different wartime experiences<br />
had created new divisions between the friends. Florina accused<br />
some of her classmates, who had spent the war period abroad, of being<br />
newly snobbish because they had travelled and experienced life elsewhere.<br />
In her words:<br />
Florina: They have changed, they’ve been through different countries,<br />
they’ve seen how life is there… Actually they were<br />
refugees there, but now they say “we’ve been abroad…”<br />
Question: So because you had different experiences – some have left,<br />
some have not – you don’t see each other like you did<br />
before, is that right?<br />
Florina: Actually since we learnt what it means to get separated from<br />
friends, we are closer to each other.<br />
Question: Even though some of them are somehow more arrogant?<br />
Florina: Not some of them but all of them are more arrogant!<br />
Florina’s remarks should be considered in the context of more widespread<br />
friction between those who stayed in Kosovo, and those who left the country.<br />
The latter are often criticized because they left the “motherland” and,<br />
in some way, because they were safe. As Florina said: “They were safe, we<br />
were not safe, we were in Kosova and we knew that nobody could do anything<br />
for us... but they knew that someone could do something for them,<br />
because they were safe… they have been helped”. For Florina, as for some<br />
of her classmates, additional “blame” is conferred upon those who left the<br />
country given the positive experiences they had abroad, and their new<br />
“status”.<br />
The varied sample of memories described by the classmates of the Meto<br />
Bajraktari school corresponded to a multiplicity of experiences. Each of<br />
these cases, however, led to a different interpretation and concept of the<br />
present, to different hopes and dreams for the future. Bekim spoke of<br />
wanting to study information technology abroad in order to work “with<br />
computers and things like this”. Florina wished to study in the United<br />
States and then to “write for newspapers, or to work as a journalist on TV”.<br />
Artan wanted to join the police “to defend Albanian people”.<br />
The burden of solidarity<br />
The different individual experiences narrated in these accounts often<br />
seemed to complicate topics that recurred as basic components in the construction<br />
of the collective memory of war addressed toward the international<br />
community. Only one of these was the concept of solidarity between<br />
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