Kosovo and how starting from scratch allows you to avoid the mistakes of others
The fact that Kosovo was established as a country just when the feminist movement was beginning to gain strength in the rest of Europe has made the country take shape, taking this struggle as an example. With many things still to change, and with women bearing the brunt of the economic crisis that has hit the country since the war, young Kosovar women have decided to build the history of their country without repeating the mistakes that the rest of the world is trying to get rid of.
"When you start a new country, in a new political space and you are aware of the invisibility of women throughout history, it is clear to you that you don't want to go in that direction", this is how Kosovo began to write its new history. And this is the way Kosovo is seen by women who try to create that "progressive discourse when you talk about what women are responsible for".
Sometimes starting over gives you the opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past or, in the case of this country, to avoid those that the rest of the world tries to correct, as is the case with women's role in their own reality. "There was no tradition established by men, and this gave women the opportunity to reclaim that ground, locate agencies and take control," explains Ermire, director of the organisation Kosovo Oral History, an association that documents the stories that occurred during the conflict.
This barely thirteen-year-old country is still carrying the trauma of a war. A war for which Kosovar women took responsibility. "What women experienced during the war is quite different depending on which part of Kosovo they are in. In Pristina, women stayed in the city and during the bombing they stayed inside their houses, trying to live a normal life. In rural areas, however, most families were refugees," explains Urtina, a young graphic designer. Living through this war where shelling was daily, checkpoints were around every corner and raids by Serbian troops were the daily bread, women, who were somehow less at risk, took over. "The police and the military would arrest or kill the men if they went out, but not the women. They didn't face that kind of danger; if they dressed up and looked upper class they could avoid police controls. So they took over everything, all the daily chores [...] Kosovar women had that solidarity, they forgot about themselves to make sure their families didn't have to experience war to the fullest". This is what Urtina has reflected in her animated film 'Those Who Drown Cling to Foam'.
This young graphic designer wanted to move away from 'traditional' films that focused on the brutality of the conflict to show "something very basic and simple, but much more intense and rare", such as women creating a parallel reality in their children's routine. And when you listen to the stories of these mothers who made war "something not so bad" you realise that it was not Roberto Benigni who invented this game that created an idyllic universe so that a child would not know what was going on around them, but it was a Kosovar mother who "wanted her family to feel as safe as possible and decided to celebrate her son's birthday party in the middle of a bombing, using the noise of those bombs as instruments to accompany her son's birthday song before he blew out the candles".
From this activism emerged Kosova Women Network, created in 2000 as a successor to the network of rural women's rights organisations, as an informal network of women and organisations operating in different regions of Kosovo, which has become an association that advocates for Kosovo's women and girls at local, regional and international levels. This organisation analyses the reality of the country to locate the hostile spaces for women, analyses the barriers and proposes solutions based on the existing legality in the country and through alternative mechanisms to promote equality.
Although Kosovo has decided to write its new history from a gender perspective, there is still a long way to go. In Europe's youngest country, only 32% of parliamentary seats are held by women, i.e. 38 women in total, 17 of which are "quota seats", and where only one party is headed by a woman.
Economically speaking, Kosovo remains one of the three lowest GDPs on the continent. In this situation of economic crisis that has dragged on since the conflict, women bear the brunt. Only 20% of the country's women are registered in the labour market and only 13% of the female population of working age are active. The country has a female unemployment rate of 37%, a figure that rises to 64% for younger women.
Within this panorama, the women's network blames social tradition for a large part of the origin of this inequality. This was pointed out by 37% of the women interviewed by the network. Kosovar women spend 300% more time than men doing housework or caring for children, and men spend 400% more time than women dealing with labour relations.
This gap deepens for women in rural areas or those belonging to one of the country's ethnic minorities such as Roma, Ashkali, Egyptian, Gorani or Turkish. In all these communities, women face more financial and cultural difficulties in accessing basic services. And, to this day, social and cultural norms in rural areas still label certain behaviours as shameful, such as a man seeing a naked woman if he is not her husband, even in a doctor's office.
These cultural standards are still deeply embedded in the country's older generations, those who fought for independence and whose reality is permeated by these memories. This may be why "fear of feminism is still widespread among many women and men in Kosovo, and feminist values and how to apply them in practice remain unclear, which can undermine the building of a feminist movement", demands KWN.
"I am aware that we have looked at that discourse, but we still have primitive notions of feminism", Ermire laments when thinking about the feminist movement within the country, "you don't see that deep feminism of countries that have been trying for centuries to change social norms through this movement". However, the director of the historical association is optimistic, "the discourse is becoming more progressive and I think that is why it is starting to be included in Kosovo in a natural way".
New generations have grown up seeing feminism as normal. Not only because of the war stories but also because Kosovo was born at a historical moment when the rest of the world was struggling to change patriarchal norms. This has made Kosovo's new reality feminist by birth.
"Because of the war, most of our parents had no access to education. They had to grow up with a patriarchal social upbringing," Urtina explains of her parents, who were refugees during the war. "After the war, the idea of women being able to access higher education, higher positions, was something difficult to assimilate [for the elders]. However, the war prevented young women from having to go through the process of deconstruction in feminism that the rest of the population has had to go through, "we have skipped a lot of things and for the better".
Now, all these young women are making sure that this country, which has just reached puberty, grows from feminism. The streets say so, where graffiti call for "equality in labour and heritage institutions", remember Musine Kokalari, the first Albanian writer and one of the first feminists in the Balkans, and celebrate the country's 'newborn' by commemorating "all women victims of sexual violence in armed conflicts".
Text and photos: Marta Moreno Guerrero