Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
managed to tend to the garden, even while hiding from the police. They
also brought home to Kosovo a new member of the family, a baby that had
been born to Bexhet’s daughter-in-law in Albania.
Though the war was over and the whole family was safe, Bexhet’s suffering
continued, even when the violence had ended:
There are no pensions, I am a pensioner but I haven’t received any pension
for 15 months, my son is not working, the others are studying…
where to take… There is no money and we need to eat… No money, no
work, no pension, where… where? The son that I have in Belgium helps
us a little bit otherwise we could die from hunger. We don’t have… I am
an old man and I don’t have pension, he [his son] has four children, then
parents… How to survive, from where? No work, no money, no pension.
They [international organizations] don’t employ people. They employed
some that know languages, some that are needed, but my son doesn’t
know languages… and from the friends… we don’t have any links. We
have some friends here but some others… they don’t know us… We
don’t have any job and this suffering is… When you don’t have money,
you don’t have anything … I didn’t receive any pension for 15 months
and we don’t have any news, factories are not working so, how? I think
that UNMIK [United Nations Interim Administration Mission in
Kosovo] and the others are not so interested.
For Bexhet, Kosovo had become a vanishing terrain, on which he and his
family were surviving without the tools (education and social connections)
needed to escape suffering and marginalization. For Bexhet, the economic
reality of post-war Kosovo was no better than it had been before the war.
To him, this meant a continuation of the suffering he had been experiencing
for so many years. Though the fear of being ousted from his land had
left with the arrival of an international protection force, daily life continued
to be a test of endurance. The explanation given for his suffering
also remained the same, and the responsibility of external elements: the
institutions which should, in normal time, act as a source of income, and
the United Nation Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), which, like the former
institutions, would not interest themselves in the well-being of the general
populace. To Bexhet, this marginalization, losing his space in his own
society and thus being displaced without leaving, was an experience
“worse than war”.
For other people, however, the end the war had brought change: their
experience of displacement was transformed into an active struggle to control
the vanishing ground that was their country. These are the people who
experienced a shift of status, from refugee to local staff.
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