Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici
Once in the cities, however, it became more difficult for the newest
migrants to recover from suffering and distress, given a social and cultural
context that was so deeply different from their previous experiences.
This difficulty emerged in the narrative of Korab. When he was 12 years
old, Korab lost both of his legs on a land mine. He was originally from
Rezalla, a village near Skenderaj, but at the time of the interview, lived
with his family in Pristina. Ever since his accident, Korab has been unhappy,
refusing to talk and not wanting to go to school. When the students
asked him why he would not attend school regularly, he replied: “Because
these guys of Pristina would tease me. They would tell me ‘you are a village
boy’. In Skenderaj nobody would tell me ‘you are a village boy’”.
Korab’s fear, exacerbated by his physical disability, seems rooted in a very
real complex relationship between the “citizens” and the “villagers” that
had newly arrived in town.
Further, those who came from the countryside arrived in Pristina with their
own tragic experiences, tied to them by painful memories. These memories
soon became the basis of a collective identity, built in order for them
to differentiate themselves from the people of the town, and which they
legitimized as the authentic national identity. 11
Azem, a citizen of Pristina who had spent the previous two years abroad,
had been shocked by a conflict he had with a “villager” that he had met by
chance in a coffee shop, and remembered the harsh conversation they had.
In his words:
I was with a friend of mine, I was telling him that I had just come back
from Italy. And this guy, one of the people from the villages, was listening
to us. Then he interrupted our conversation and addressed his words
to me, talking loudly. “Where were you? Where were you while we were
fighting against the enemy? We fought against the Serbs, we liberated
Kosova! We gave freedom to Kosova!.” This is what they think, they
think that we don’t have any rights in Kosova because we didn’t suffer
as much as they did. We have always had different mentalities, but now
there is much more tension.
Towards the villagers newly living in Pristina, on the other hand, the native
inhabitants of the capital seemed to harbour different, and in some ways,
contradictory feelings. They recognized first that the village-dwellers had
suffered the most from the war, and the knowledge was integrated into the
collective memory of abuse enacted upon the Kosovar Albanians. This
sentiment was echoed by Gentiana, who had always lived in Pristina:
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…In the villages, people had terrible experiences. Nothing so terrible
happened in town, but in the countryside the Serbs killed hundreds of