Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 2 • Annie Lafontaine
the Drenica region. 1 Focusing on interviews and on extensive notes from
ethnographic fieldwork, this paper will explore some of the many forms
and meanings that the concepts of “displacement” and “suffering” have
taken, and are still taking, in Kosovo, in order to understand how people
narrate their experience of suffering, in relation to these various forms of
displacement. I also aim to show how these individuals link their own
experiences to a greater discourse of suffering that has contributed to the
development of a common identity throughout the 1990s. (After 1989,
when the autonomy of the province was suppressed by the Yugoslav
Government, thousands of Albanians were fired from their jobs, students
were pushed out of the schools and the university, and around 400,000
people emigrated to European countries and North America). I wish therefore
to explore the interweaving of displacement and suffering in the
Albanian society of Kosovo.
Displacement
Displacement is a broad category which includes several different types of
phenomena, from the massive and sudden exile of refugees, to the very
intimate and individual experience, where the ground once taken for granted
vanishes, when the dramatic change of one’s living context creates the
impression of being somewhere unknown. For the past decade, primarily
since the war of 1998 and 1999, Kosovo seems to have been one example
of this vanishing ground, and on it, every type of displacement is taking
place.
At first glance, Kosovo’s displacements seem to fit within documented
categories such as “migration”, “internal displacement”, “refugee”,
“Diaspora”, “repatriation”, “immigration”, and “emigration”, yet these
classifications belong to a study of migration dependent upon theoretical
models that followed the nation-state paradigm until the end of the 1980s.
This means that the only individuals and groups of people considered
“weakened” by war and political violence, and thus seen as suffering or in
need of assistance and protection, were those who had been forced out of
the territory to which they were supposed to belong, or those who had left.
This model was contested during the decade that followed, on the grounds
that it too greatly reduced the category of displacement and rooted people
in a specific territory (Kearney, 1986 and 1995; Borowski et al., 1994). It
was further understood that the model treated displacement as a pathology
and considered these displaced people or refugees as persons left without
any identity, “disconnected” from a “national” collective memory. Taken
one step further, these people were considered threats when away from
54