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