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order to attend university. From the autumn of 1998, when the war was
going on in my village, not only was it difficult for us to go back home,
but we were also following and feeling everything that was going on. We
were in the flow of the events happening there, and thus we lost our will
not only to go out to walk and have fun but also to do anything. Before
the NATO bombing, Prishtina was almost untouched by the war, and the
situation here was as always different from the other parts of Kosovo.
That bothered us… here [in Pristina] life used to go on as though nothing
was happening elsewhere in Kosovo. Here life was like in
Switzerland or Paris… everything was normal, you could hear music
from cafés full of people, who were having fun until late in the night. 9
According to Ardita, these different experiences of the war also determined
the different conditions of the present:
…Especially for financial aspects, Prishtina has always gained mostly, it
hasn’t been destroyed, people found their houses and flats without them
being burned or demolished. People fled first as soon as the war began,
and as soon as it was finished they came back first. They rented their
houses to the foreign organizations, they started to work in different
organizations. And it is much harder for the villagers since they are still
as poor as they were before. Some of them have spent the winter in a tent.
Villagers in town
Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
Following the war, a considerable migration flow brought many Kosovars
from the rural areas to the towns, 10 as many people were then homeless
and the economy of most villages, already seriously damaged by enormous
pressure on the scarce agricultural land (Roux, 1992: 322), had been
destroyed. Though at first people had returned to working the land, they
soon had to find a means of supplementing their insufficient incomes,
especially those who could not rely on financial support from relatives
who had migrated to other countries. One solution available to them was
to divide their time between agricultural activity and work found in the
nearest town. This greater mobility, along with new opportunities for
employment, seems to have fostered a greater interaction between the rural
and urban economies, uniting them under the survival strategies of peasant
families. Despite this, however, people living in the countryside maintained
that life in the villages was still very hard, while towns were perceived
as places where most of the changes occurred, especially because
of the massive presence of the international community.
The effects of the large-scale migrations were most evident in the capital,
Pristina. Migrations occurred in the usual pattern: the former villagers
were hosted by relatives living in the city for a first period of time, after
which the luckiest managed to find housing and a more or less stable job.
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