Home Series “Displaced persons” – Description

Series “Displaced persons” – Description

Series “Displaced persons” – Description

“…more and more bullets were being shot, more and more grenades were falling from the sky over the playground where we used to play […] some of the grenades fell where we used to play basketball in our neighborhood. So, we felt it was not safe for us to stay there anymore…” – Statement of a narrator.

 

The series “Displaced persons” focuses on one of the groups that suffered the most during the war of 2001 – those who, under a direct threat of violence had to abandon their homes, not knowing if they would ever return. Some of them left by car, some by tractor and some on foot, but they all shared the same uncertainty and suspense of what would come next. We consider all of them “refugees” or “internally displaced persons”, regardless of whether they have applied for and were granted the official status of internally displaced persons or not.

The stories of the internally displaced persons are not a simple record of events these people have witnessed. They are, above all, chronicles of a different, truthful reality which still exists in its authentic form, despite all the prevailing distorted images we have of that time. The frankness of these stories often leaves one with a feeling of bitterness, sadness, compassion and sympathy, but in the end, they awake in us the will to uncover a reality which is being perverted by all kinds of private interests for more than a decade, and they finally open the path towards a process of dealing with the past. The home, being primarily a space of safety, comfort and family affection, is one of the most vital psychological bases for feeling emotionally secure, but for many people from Macedonia in 2001, the home was a place of traumatic experience. Precisely because of the imperilment and deprivation of all those feelings usually attributed to the home, the stories of the internally displaced persons are a remarkable source of somewhat different personal interpretations of the war events. Being influenced by the disturbing effect which the loss of their homes had on the internally displaced persons, these interpretations kept their authenticity and remained distant from the politically motivated stories, which structured the experience of that reality for most of the Macedonian citizens at the time.

A major difference that separates the internally displaced persons is whether they returned to their homes after the conflict or not. There are enough examples of both in Macedonia. But, they all suffered, and not only during the conflict, but also in the years to follow. Cases of trauma were very common among the internally displaced persons; almost every displaced family suffered enormous material damages and some of them even lost members of their families. Some of the homes that were not destroyed during the war, were damaged, robbed or set on fire afterwards. Many of the narrators are evidently overly attached to the past, the circumstances and the perceptions of that time, which causes a continuous presence of fear and frustration in their personal lives. Some of them never went back to their homes, and in their stories, that’s reflected in their painful longing to return home – a longing that brought about much suffering and disappointment in the years following 2001.

28 stories were collected in this series in the few months between the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. 12 of those interviews were published by Peace Action in the autumn of 2013 in the book “Огништа/Vatra” [Hearths].

 

An excerpt on internal displacement in 2001 from the book “Огништа/Vatra” [Hearths]:

The process of internal displacement began toward the end of February 2001 in villages near the Kosovo borders in the north part of Macedonia and was intensified in mid-March 2001, when the violence started to spread in Tetovo, and later in Kumanovo.

By mid-July, eight facilities for collective housing were established (six in Skopje and two in Kumanovo). Still, most of the IDPs found refuge in the homes of friends and relatives. In August 2001, 70.728 internally displaced persons were registered by the Macedonian Red Cross, 66.871 of which were settled with friends and family and 3.857 in collective housing facilities. According to the IDMC report from 2008, the armed clash from 2001 resulted in more than 171.000 displaced persons, 74.000 of which were internally displaced. According to another report from USCRI from 2001, around 76.000 people sought refuge in Kosovo. 95% of them have since returned, while around 700 people never got back (these numbers vary; according to the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, by the end of 2009, another 644 internally displaced persons were registered). What was evident was that a larger portion of the Albanian population returned to their homes, compared to the Macedonian and the Serbian population. There were cases of assaults on those who returned home (some of which had lethal consequences) and they were facing constant pressure to leave their homes in the places where they didn’t belong to the majority. Numerous cases of interethnic vandalism, torture and violence have been noted in the reports of various organizations, beginning from 2003. For example, in Opae, a village near Kumanovo, 46 reconstructed homes were either robbed or demolished in 2003. According to ICRC, 66% of the IDPs in 2004 expressed that they were either unable or unprepared to return to their birthplace due to assumed or justified fear for their safety.

According to data collected by Peace Action, a large number of displaced families from Lipkovo and Arachinovo will never return because, thanks to their lawsuits against the state, they were assigned, as a compensation for damaged property, around 20.000 euro per family – money they used to build new homes in the periphery of Skopje and Kumanovo. We mention these numbers in order to present a clearer picture of the process of displacement, forced by the war of 2001, and to keep in mind the hundreds of displaced persons, who were forced to build a new life in a new environment in the past few years. Unfortunately, the silent process of ethnic homogenization continues in almost every place where Macedonians and Albanians mix.