7th
July 2003
(Luan
Qorraj)
The Kosovar population has gone through some hard years-
from the beginning of the 90’s and the uncertainty of the future- through the
times of war, up to now, when thousands of people are still missing and most
families still have to struggle to secure their daily food. So how deep are the
scars really and what is the toll that the past years have taken on the people
of Kosovo?
There was no full study done on the subject, but there are
numbers, which can tell a part of a story. In the Drenica region alone in the
last four years there was a 300 percent rise in the suicide rate within a
population known to rarely give into desperation. There is, at least, a
doubling in the number of divorces, an increase in drug usage within the
younger population and countless cases of domestic violence or aggravated
assaults that happened for no apparent reason- all of these indicating that
something is wrong within society. According to Ali Riza Arenliu, from the
institute of public health, people have defenses that should protect them but
after a prolonged period of time, these defenses fail:
Ali Riza Arenliu: Every man has his own
mechanisms with which he deals with everyday life. You can imagine this as
baggage that we carry with ourselves and whenever we are in a new situation we
pull out a new appliance to face it. Not every man has in his baggage the
appliances he needs to face the everyday problems brought by the new life, the
new way – the transformation into a nuclear family, a growth in individual
interest – despite the collective one. These are all changes that we are living
in and not every man has the needed appliances to face all of these situations.
While Dr. Gani Shabani,
the head of the community mental health center in Mitrovica, who has spent the
past four years working with trauma victims in the Drenica region, says the
situation in the field is far from being bright. He adds that, because of the
nature of the war most of the people he has treated were women - since they
were often the ones left behind to tell the story
Dr. Gani Shabani: When it comes to Post
Traumatic Stress Disorders – the numbers are pretty large – there are also
other disorders, depressions, and neurotic disorders, up to the hardest cases,
which have gone into psychosis. The largest number of them is in Skenderaj
region – where lately, after the war, there are suicides and attempted suicides
which disturbs us a lot.
Dr Shabani says that despite the hard work put in by the
people from his centre, treating people who are suffering post war traumas and
who still hurt for their loved ones is a difficult task- especially if there is
no general plan on helping people Kosovo-wide:
Dr. Gani Shabani: I had cases when mothers lost
their only son- for them everything was over – it is very difficult to convince
her otherwise since she accused herself of not doing anything, although she
couldn’t have done anything to save her child. Then there is a big problem of
the missing. Four years after a piece of their clothing is found and the family
doesn’t accept that he is dead. The others are searching for graves, it is very
problematic.
Kosovar society, as it is
today, is not a very healthy environment for those who have already been
exposed to more than they could take. Feride Rushiti is from the Kosovar center
for rehabilitation of torture victims, which assists sufferers of all sorts of
trauma-related problems. Up to now the centre has had over 10 thousand clients suffering from all kinds of disorders –
says that what people need now is security, something not easily found
in a society which has low employment, political instability and complete
uncertainty of what the future will bring. Plus, she adds, that in a rapidly
changing Kosovo people also lost their natural means of support:
Feride Rushiti: Even the family, as it was
before – a very strong institution, is disappearing, it is going towards
Europeanization, the patriarchal families are disappearing, there is a silent
war between the old and the new and this destabilizes the situation even more
and it makes it even harder for the victims with which we are working
But, unfortunately, the story doesn’t end here. There are
new cases of mental health problems appearing daily. Dr Gani Shabani says that
a certain number of new cases can be explained because of the nature of PTSD-
but, that will account for only a few of them:
Dr Gani Shabani: there are new cases of these
disorders appearing- although Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can appear after
4, 5 or even more years. But the biggest problem are the suicide cases. And
there are new cases, people that didn’t have mental disorders before or after
the war – until the last couple of months.
Ulpiana Neziri: for many years, entire generations of kosovars
have grown up believing that their outside source of unhappiness is occupation.
And the belief that “at the moment we are free – we will be capable to develop,
to be happy.” But this didn’t happen.
A fact which, says
Ulpiana, might account for at least a part of the increase in suicide rates is
also the lack of a guilty party. For years there was an enemy to blame for
everything- nowdays there is no enemy left, and the enemy took the hope that
things will get better with him:
Ulpiana Neziri: If an individual finds an outside
source of his unhappiness, his extreme response is murder- the elimination of
the cause of unhappiness. If the individual is not capable of identifying an
outside source of his unhappiness his extreme response is suicide.
And of course it’s not
just the majority Albanian community which suffers from trauma-related mental
health problems. These can be found in all of Kosovo’s communities. For some,
isolated in enclaves or marginalized by poverty, the problems can be even more
severe.
Add the re-traumatizing
to all of that and the result can be an explosive mix of various experiences,
says Feride Rushiti. Her centre had to treat the same people over and over
again, after they were believed to be cured:
Feride Rushiti: during the crisis in Macedonia we have seen
that the clients that we treated were in very bad condition. After 5 or
6 sessions, after we thought that these clients have been rehabilitated they
came looking for help again- because of the fear that the war will come back to
Kosovo. The same thing goes for the Milosevic trial, we came out with this
study and most of our clients, after they saw it on TV were in very poor
psychological shape and all the symptoms they have manifested in the beginning
were appearing again.
And they will appear
again says, Ali Riza Arenliu from the Public Health institute. A lot of people
have suffered deeply and lost the people they loved the most. Now, instead of
finding at least some sort of comfort within the society- they find themselves
marginalized and feel completely lost and vulnerable:
Ali Riza Arenliu: Ex- KLA fighters, citizens,
orphans – if they do not get the necessary social support- not to speak of the
economic and other types of support it is logical to expect that these people
will have problems since the conditions they are in are not normal. They have
lost something from before- something that may have given them support – and if
the society doesn’t offer them that support then the probability that they will
be re-traumatized or have mental health problems is much higher.
Ulpiana Neziri: Until Kosovo becomes a
completely functioning society we should be ready for more years like these. We
should be ready for the moment a person understands how hard it is to make
changes and how good are the changes – and what role can an individual have in
the general process of the changes. Then the individual will be stronger and be
less liable to give into the weaknesses of the moment.