Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
Mountains, sleeping in their cars and fighting cold and hunger. After four
days and nights, the Serbian police sent them back to their town. Suzana
had been driving during the entire ordeal. Once home, the family was
forced to hide in the house, with Suzana often standing vigil outside, in the
middle of the night.
Before the war, Suzana had studied Law at the University of Pristina and
was sensitive to the political problems of Kosovo:
[The war] stopped many things in my life. It stopped many things in my
life… and it was… because I was not thinking of… you know… buying
things, having a good life, going to the parties, no I didn’t think of that.
She participated in the student protests of 1997, and to her, this was when
the war truly began. She considered her first “displacement” to have been
her move from her town to Pristina. She felt compelled to become
involved in the student resistance movement because she could find no
other way to give meaning to her life:
...Once I thought that there [was] no need, no reason to study if we don’t
finish this [movement] because it was coming ‘till here [to the nose], it
was everything boring, we used to go in private houses [to study], we
used to do exams, we...
Because of the apartheid-like regime in Kosovo, young Albanians had to
study in private houses opened to them by a few families or by the professors
themselves. Some Albanians studied in garages or wrote college
papers sitting on the floor. The students suffered together the collective
affront to the Kosovar Albanians. Suzana spoke of this:
Yes, everyone was tired [of] that... All the people, with President Rugova,
we agreed like he said that we should fight in peace, so we should suffer,
and suffer until…the cup was full, [as] people say, and the end came in
1998… there is a limit; everywhere there is a limit [to] anything… so the
limit came… People had...suffered enough; they wanted something… It
[had been] a kind of sacrifice… that people were dying, surviving or …
living in jails and nobody would know… I mean, you were not allowed
to write [what was happening] in newspapers … So we started to do that
[resist] step by step…How could [we] tolerate this when Serb police
started to go into our houses and to beat you up, or rape your wife or your
children and … would you say [as] Rugova said “let’s be quiet still
because it is not [the time] to raise our voice”? … But we waited for ten
years… we waited enough… ‘till… but in that time even there were
dangerous people… I know that everybody wants a normal life, even
…if the police comes in your house and [enforces his] control and [does]
everything that has been done to most of the families in Kosova… But
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