Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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<strong>Psychosocial</strong> <strong>Notebook</strong>, Volume 2, October 2001<br />
people, burnt houses… Here the consequences of the war are not so visible,<br />
but outside Prishtina, terrible massacres were committed; there are<br />
villages in which you cannot find a male more than 12 years old.<br />
Yet this narrative of the suffering villages – presented as a symbol of the<br />
suffering of the Kosovar Albanian community as a whole – became a worried<br />
criticism of the villagers’ use of the past as a means of claiming advantages<br />
in the present, and of the radicalism perceived in the rural population.<br />
Azem, for instance (who probably felt both included and excluded<br />
from the Albanian Kosovar community, given his time spent abroad<br />
and his intentions to return to Italy), expressed this ambivalence without<br />
hesitation.<br />
The villagers come here in Prishtina and they want a house, they want a<br />
job, they want the best positions, the positions of power. They want<br />
everything because they suffered the war. It’s true that they suffered a lot,<br />
but they don’t have the right to obtain everything they ask for… And they<br />
are the most extremist, we don’t agree with them because they are the<br />
most extremist.<br />
Apart from this concept of competition very much aligned with divisions<br />
in Kosovar society that have heightened during the war, there also seems<br />
to be a desire amongst the city dwellers to distance themselves from a<br />
political radicalism which is not recognized by the entire Albanian community,<br />
and which, therefore, cannot be accepted within its collective<br />
identity.<br />
Further, once conversations about the village migrants left the topic of<br />
uneven suffering, the villagers could become objects of ridicule and denigration.<br />
According to Lindita:<br />
They don’t know the rules. I think that it is a matter of culture. The culture<br />
is not the right one. Because they don’t have any education, and they<br />
didn’t go out from the villages, or even from their houses so they don’t<br />
know how life is. So when they come here they just don’t know how to<br />
behave and from that you can recognize them. And also from the way<br />
they are dressed, from the way they talk.<br />
Many jokes about “the villagers” are circulated and whispered throughout<br />
Pristina, along with stories that blame them for bad living conditions in the<br />
capital. According to Sevdie:<br />
[Many of] these people came to Prishtina and took two or three houses,<br />
but they also kept the ones they had in the village. And now here in<br />
Prishtina we don’t have enough houses.<br />
39