Political science author Vjosa Musliu’s most recent book, Girlhood at War, examines the experiences of her 12-year-old self during the 1998-1999 conflict in Kosovo. Musliu explains how international organizations responded quickly to the end of the war by providing Serbs and Albanians living in Kosovo with workshops on peace and reconciliation.
She describes one such session that she attended as a teenager in 2002 in the final chapter, “Little Red Riding Hood.” The workshop, which was led by Belgian and British facilitators, began with the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, which the participants were asked to reimagine from the perspective of the wolf.
The wolf had not eaten in weeks when he met the girl in the red hood because the forest’s massive deforestation had made him more isolated. The wolf ate the grandmother and the girl out of fear of their imminent death.
Musliu and her classmates struggled to understand the significance of the story in a workshop on reconciliation, first to understand how hunger might have justified the wolf killing the young girl and her grandmother. The facilitators explained that the exercise was intended to demonstrate that there are always new perspectives on every story, that the truth can be found somewhere in the middle, and that there are always new perspectives.
More than 20 years later, I was in a very similar situation. I took part in a workshop led by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in October to bring together young women from Kosovo and Serbia to practice dialogue and peacemaking.
We also had a foreign facilitator and several international speakers, just like Musliu. It was obvious that both had been given a thorough script that they could not deviate from this time, which included two additional assistant facilitators, one from Kosovo and one from Serbia.
We were asked to explain our understanding of peace on the training’s first day. We did this by sharing a number of traumatic story accounts. Some things keep me from stopping to think about. The facilitator appeared more preoccupied with our running fifteen minutes late than with our conversation. The depth of those stories, the bravery, and vulnerability that they possessed sounded uncomfortably small.
We were given more information about integrative negotiations on the second day. In a bullet point, the presentation stated that negotiating involves “separating the people from the problem.” I couldn’t continue reading because I felt something in my chest as I read it.
When I am aware of what happened to my family and my neighborhood during the war, how can I separate the perpetrators from the perpetrators? Before Serb forces arrived in Albania, my parents were forced to flee, but when they returned, their home was damaged, broken into, and some items missing, including my mother’s wedding dress. According to neighbors, Serb soldiers regularly burned women’s wedding dresses they discovered.
Other crimes included broken homes in some neighborhoods as well. More than 20 000 girls, boys, women, and men were raped, and over 8, 000 ethnic Albanian civilians were killed or forcibly disappeared.
I was trying to protect myself during the rape because I was only an 11-year-old. But I was marked. This is the memory you’ll keep of us, they carved a cross into my heart. From the inside out, it destroyed me as a child. One survivor recalled how they used a knife to leave those marks on me.
Knowing this and so many others, it was difficult to convey to a group of young women whose families were forced to relocate, be tortured, or be killed during the war that the issue must be secluded from the population.
Foreign facilitators would take a taxi to the airport, fly home, and leave behind the survivors who are still struggling to transition from war to peace and all the suffering in between, which is simple for them. We should ask them how their differences would be resolved if the wolf had eaten their grandmothers, Musliu said at the conclusion of her story about peacemaking.
We were given seats in the conference room where we were mixed throughout the workshop, with the girls from Kosovo and Serbia seated next to each other. We sat at different tables as soon as the lunch break began, which was a failure.
When the organisers inquired about this division, I responded that the workshop had not yet addressed the topic of the room, which was the war itself. Without bringing up the causes of the war, what transpired during it, and how it ended, how could there possibly be peace and resolution? If there was no way to talk about justice, how could we reconcile?
The facilitators intervened whenever I wanted to highlight the complexity of the post-war situation, such as when I brought up the topic of survivors of sexual violence. They said, “You are not ready yet” to discuss this.
I was moved when someone else evaluated my conversational skills. The West frequently uses it when speaking to people outside of the West. We are told that we are “not ready” for democracy, “not prepared” for self-government, and “not objective enough” to confront our own past.
To determine who can speak and who must listen, civilization is measured by readiness. In these settings, power is the key to “not being ready,” not emotional strength. It is polite to say that our pain must wait for translation, moderation, and approval because our truth is awkward.
The claim that the workshop’s organizers placed a focus on gender was overstated, but they also avoided the subject of rape as a war crime because it went beyond the level of depth, or rather, superficiality, that they had planned.
The facilitator stated that we would discuss historical narratives even if we disagree with all of them on the fifth day of the training.
It is obvious that such a task was useful for the organizers. I found it dangerous to use different perspectives and truths interchangeably. The distinction between true events and true events may become blurry.
Yes, there are many perspectives and experiences in wars, but there isn’t much truth to be found in all of them. Truth rests on evidence and is founded on facts, not balance or compromise. We run the risk of distorting the truth when we challenge or debate facts, and we also run the risk of making assumptions that are reasonable in terms of historical interpretations.
There are many truths to a story, and so I sat there 26 years after the end of the war as a result. I was told to let go of the past, look forward, reconcile, and find a way to live together.
I have to wonder how someone will go about teaching the Palestinians who went through genocidal horrors as children Western-style peacebuilding.
How would they approach a Palestinian and say that the Gaza genocide story contains many truths? How on earth would this promote peace?
I don’t want to be a part of it if this is what the West refers to as building peace today.
