Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici<br />
Patriarchy, tradition, national identity<br />
More difficult for Kosovar-Albanian women than recognizing the advantages<br />
of work, was understanding their past and present experiences within<br />
a socio-cultural environment characterized (especially in rural areas) by<br />
a rigid and persisting patriarchy, where womens’ rights to be educated, to<br />
work, or to participate in decision-making both at home and in political<br />
realms were largely unrecognised. This patriarchal structure of the<br />
Albanian family and community had been adopted by Kosovo’s Serbs, as<br />
evidence of their otherness, and of the difference between the two communities’<br />
cultures, 14 even though a patriarchal model still holds amongst<br />
the Serbs themselves. 15 The story told by Milica gives us just one example<br />
of this:<br />
I would like just to tell you that I only feel sorry for the Albanian women,<br />
who are abused in this war. I feel sorry for these women because I had<br />
the possibility to be with them in hospital, before the war. There was<br />
already the conflict between Serbs and Albanians, you know, in the<br />
woods. I saw an Albanian woman, she had [her] fourth baby… she was<br />
young, I think she was 21, but she had [a] fourth daughter. And when the<br />
husband heard that she had another daughter he didn’t want to take her<br />
home, and she stayed there until her father came to take her. I felt very<br />
sorry for her, because it was very stupid.<br />
Milica’s account, though presented with concern and feminine solidarity,<br />
is reminiscent of the denigration campaign led by Milosevic’s regime<br />
against Albanians that began in the 1990s. Yugoslavian propaganda portrayed<br />
Albanian women as victims, backward and uneducated “prisoners<br />
of the patriarchy”, entirely under the control of fathers and husbands who<br />
objectified them and reduced them to “baby factories” (Bracewell, 1996:<br />
26-27). Amongst Kosovar-Albanian women, however, the family, with its<br />
patriarchal structure, is highly valued as the basic unit of their community’s<br />
culture. Though this view varied in conviction from subject to subject,<br />
the habits and customs identified with the Kosovar-Albanian tradition<br />
are also fundamental elements of the national identity. The links between<br />
the patriarchy and the construction of the national identity, probably even<br />
reinforced by the Yugoslavian propaganda and the radicalization of the<br />
conflict, make it even more difficult for women to criticize the patriarchy<br />
and to recognize their own needs and expectations either as individual<br />
women or as a group. As has already been shown, nationalism forbids any<br />
conflict that could compromise the stability of gender relations, since this<br />
stability is one of the pillars that unites and holds together the nation itself<br />
(Milic, 1996).<br />
44