Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 2 • Annie Lafontaine
you have that fear inside from them but you have also the strength that
Albanians have inside… that one day all that torture will come to an end;
it is not only physical torture, but also mental torture… I knew that and
I wanted to be like that [opposing the violence]… sometimes I am a
radical… really… but I’m not an extremist…
Looking back upon those past three years, Suzana was able to give a teleological
meaning to the experience of war and its consequences: the forced
displacement. She linked the collective, population-wide suffering of
Albanians in the 1990s with the emerging strength of her people, and made
them a pillar of her identity, and an explanation for inevitable conflict and
displacement. In this section of the interview, Suzana spoke in a way that
was representative of the group of Albanians in their twenties, most of
them from villages (Suzana was born in a village of the Drenica region,
where the ethnic majority is Albanian, and where the war began in March
1998), whose memory does not extend much further than the time when
ethnic identities radicalized, sparking cycles of violence, breeding hatred,
causing suffering and forced displacement.
Throughout her narrative, Suzana related her displacements (from the
exile of her brothers to her move to Pristina and exodus to Albania), to the
collective suffering of the Albanian people under political oppression.
Every displacement Suzana endured became yet another instance of this
suffering, and added to her determination to stop it. In her narrative, her
experience was not isolated misfortune, but a communal affliction. This
idea of suffering as sacrifice acted as a normative discourse, giving meaning
to her individual experience and providing her strength that came with
belonging to this Kosovar Albanian society.
Unlike this younger age group, older Albanians tended to extend their recollection
of suffering over a longer period of time. During an interview,
Bexhet, a 65-year-old Albanian man from Prizren, said:
While my father was alive [resistance took place] with guns and after
that, with suffering because we couldn’t keep arms… This house that I
have now in Prizren is the seventh one in my life. From my father’s
house from which he was expelled, we continued changing…houses…
Then we ran away because… We have suffered a lot… always running
away from here to there, no job, no school, no money… Ah, this is worse
than war.
In the spring of 1999, Bexhet remained at home with his wife, who was
too sick to walk. His children and grandchildren left for Albania on foot.
When they came back that summer, they found that Bexhet’s wife had
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