Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
people, burnt houses… Here the consequences of the war are not so visible,
but outside Prishtina, terrible massacres were committed; there are
villages in which you cannot find a male more than 12 years old.
Yet this narrative of the suffering villages – presented as a symbol of the
suffering of the Kosovar Albanian community as a whole – became a worried
criticism of the villagers’ use of the past as a means of claiming advantages
in the present, and of the radicalism perceived in the rural population.
Azem, for instance (who probably felt both included and excluded
from the Albanian Kosovar community, given his time spent abroad
and his intentions to return to Italy), expressed this ambivalence without
hesitation.
The villagers come here in Prishtina and they want a house, they want a
job, they want the best positions, the positions of power. They want
everything because they suffered the war. It’s true that they suffered a lot,
but they don’t have the right to obtain everything they ask for… And they
are the most extremist, we don’t agree with them because they are the
most extremist.
Apart from this concept of competition very much aligned with divisions
in Kosovar society that have heightened during the war, there also seems
to be a desire amongst the city dwellers to distance themselves from a
political radicalism which is not recognized by the entire Albanian community,
and which, therefore, cannot be accepted within its collective
identity.
Further, once conversations about the village migrants left the topic of
uneven suffering, the villagers could become objects of ridicule and denigration.
According to Lindita:
They don’t know the rules. I think that it is a matter of culture. The culture
is not the right one. Because they don’t have any education, and they
didn’t go out from the villages, or even from their houses so they don’t
know how life is. So when they come here they just don’t know how to
behave and from that you can recognize them. And also from the way
they are dressed, from the way they talk.
Many jokes about “the villagers” are circulated and whispered throughout
Pristina, along with stories that blame them for bad living conditions in the
capital. According to Sevdie:
[Many of] these people came to Prishtina and took two or three houses,
but they also kept the ones they had in the village. And now here in
Prishtina we don’t have enough houses.
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