Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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Chapter 2 • Annie Lafontaine<br />
Why? It was my desire only for that day because later I understood that<br />
your home is the best place for you no matter where you go. [...] I’m<br />
telling you because I’ve been in other places, like Switzerland, France,<br />
Italy, and I’ve been told also by the others that if Kosovo will be reconstructed<br />
it will become a second New York.<br />
Vjoca was 14 years old when she first dreamed of going away. Twentynine<br />
years later, she decided to stay “home”. She was disappointed to see<br />
that Albania was not as it was described in the smuggled books of her<br />
childhood. She also expected Kosovo to become a different land, as economically<br />
and politically healthy as the image she once had of New York,<br />
where thousands of Albanians from Kosovo went, as refugees, during the<br />
1990s.<br />
In the early 1990s, when the Albanian border was easier to cross, Vjoca<br />
was entertaining a friend of her brother-in-law’s, who had come from<br />
Durrës in Albania:<br />
We have written to each other [...] the letters were opened and read. [...]<br />
We were afraid to write something else [to him] but, “how are you”, “are<br />
you doing O.K”, no more [...] we realized how they lived when he came<br />
to visit us. When we gave [a] present to him, he said: “Don’t do it please,<br />
because if you come to visit us we won’t be able to give you anything,<br />
we are very poor”. Then we realized that something was wrong there.<br />
Nevertheless, people communicated, nothing could stop them from seeing<br />
Albania. My brother [crossed] the border illegally, and afterwards he<br />
went to Switzerland. This happened in 1983.<br />
Vjoca interpreted this denial of free movement as an event that gave<br />
strength to a collective identity. As she said, “Nothing could stop ‘them’”.<br />
To her, this strength came from the fact that many people did manage to<br />
leave the province, despite its well-guarded borders. Crossing the border<br />
was seen as an act of resistance to the regime imposed by Belgrade on the<br />
Albanians of Kosovo.<br />
“Diasporic” families: suffering on the land,<br />
resisting with movement<br />
The economic and political marginalization of the Albanians of Kosovo<br />
during the 1990s helped strengthen the bonds between the Kosovar<br />
Albanians and their extended family, which generated a surge of immigration.<br />
Between 1990 and 1998, around 400,000 Albanians left Kosovo.<br />
Resistance to an oppressive regime was being constructed within these<br />
“diasporic families” of recent migrations.<br />
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