Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

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