Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

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