In her latest book, Girlhood at War, political scientist Vijosa Muryu tells the story of the 1998-99 Kosovo war through the eyes of her 12-year-old self. Muslim describes how, after the end of the war, international organizations quickly provided workshops on reconciliation and peacebuilding to Serbs and Albanians living in Kosovo.
The final chapter, “Little Red Riding Hood,” describes one such session she attended as a teenager in 2002. Led by facilitators from Belgium and the UK, the workshop began with the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and participants were asked to reimagine the story from the wolf’s perspective.
In the reimagined version, the wolf had become increasingly isolated due to large-scale deforestation, so when he met the girl with the red hood, the wolf had not eaten for weeks. The wolf, driven by hunger and fear of dying, ate the old woman and the girl.
This story perplexed Muslims and their allies. They first struggled to understand how hunger could justify the wolf’s killing of the girl and her grandmother, and then they struggled to understand the purpose of this story in the reconciliation workshop. The facilitator explained that the purpose of the exercise was to show that every story has many perspectives, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and that there can always be a different truth.
As absurd as it may seem, over 20 years later I found myself in a similar situation. In October, I attended a workshop organized by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that brought together young women from Kosovo and Serbia to teach them dialogue and peacemaking.
Just like Musliu, we also had a foreign facilitator and a few international speakers. This time, we also added two assistant facilitators from Kosovo and Serbia. It was clear that both of them had been given a detailed script to follow and could not deviate from it.
On the first day of training, we were asked to explain how we understood peace. So we did so by sharing different stories, many of them traumatic. I still can’t stop thinking about some of them. The facilitator didn’t seem to care much about what we were saying and was obsessed with us running 15 minutes late. There seemed to be little understanding of the depth of emotion, courage and vulnerability in those stories.
On the second day, we learned about integration negotiations. One of the bullet points in the presentation said that negotiation requires “separating people from the problem.” I read that and felt something in my chest. I couldn’t continue reading any further.
How can I separate people from the problem when they know what happened to my family and community during the war?My parents were forced to flee to Albania before Serbian forces invaded their neighborhood. When they returned, their home had been broken into and damaged, and several items were missing, including their mother’s wedding dress. Neighbors said Serb soldiers purposely burned the women’s wedding dresses they found.
In other communities, crime went far beyond broken homes. More than 8,000 ethnic Albanian civilians were killed or forcibly disappeared. More than 20,000 girls, boys, women and men were raped.
“During the rape, I was trying to protect myself. I was only an 11-year-old child. But they marked me. They carved a cross on me and said, ‘This is what you leave as our memory.'” It destroyed me from the inside as a child. They made such marks on me with a knife,” one survivor said.
Knowing this story and many others, I found it difficult to understand how a group of young women, whose families were displaced, raped, tortured, and killed during the war, could be told that this issue must be separated from the people.
It may be easier for foreign facilitators to do so. Because at the end of the peacebuilding workshop, they take a taxi to the airport and fly home, leaving behind survivors who are still suffering from the transition from war to peace and all the pain in between. I remembered what the Muslim said at the end of the story about the reconciliation between the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood. “If the wolf ate the old woman, you should ask them how they would reconcile their differences?”
Throughout the workshop, we were assigned seats in a conference room, with a Kosovo girl and a Serbian girl sitting next to each other. However, as soon as lunch time arrived, the attempts to get us to sit together and get along failed and we were seated at separate tables.
When asked about this section by the organizers, I replied that this workshop had not yet addressed the elephant in the room: war itself. Without discussing what caused the war, what happened during the war, and how the war ended, how can we think that there can be a solution and an end? If we can’t talk about justice, how can we reconcile?
Every time I wanted to emphasize the complexity of the post-war situation, for example to bring up the topic of victims of sexual violence, the facilitator would intervene and say, “We’re not ready to talk about this yet.”
I was furious when I heard others evaluating my conversational skills. This is the tone Western countries often use when speaking to the world. We are told that we are not “ready” for democracy, that we are not “ready” for self-government, that we are “not objective enough” to face our past.
Readiness becomes the way we measure civilization and decide who can speak and who needs to listen. In a space like this, being “not ready” is never a matter of emotional strength. It’s about power. This is a polite way of communicating that our truth is inconvenient and our pain must await translation, adjustment, and acknowledgment.
This speaks volumes about how the workshop organizers claimed to focus on gender while simultaneously avoiding the topic of rape as a war crime. Because it was beyond the level of depth, or rather surface level, that they had planned for the agenda.
On the fifth day of the training, the facilitators announced that they would talk about historical stories to understand “different perspectives and different truths, even if we don’t agree with everything.”
For the organizers, such an exercise was clearly beneficial. For me, it was dangerous to use perspective and truth interchangeably. It can blur the line between fact and story.
Sure, there may be different perspectives and experiences in war, but the truth is not among those that can be multiplied. Above all, truth is not a matter of balance or compromise. It is evidence-based and fact-based. When you challenge or debate facts, you risk distorting the truth. We risk allowing falsehoods to look like rational interpretations of history.
And on that day, 26 years after the end of the war, I sat listening to a message that was painful, outrageous, and dangerous. It was, “There’s a lot of truth in the story.” We are now told that we must leave behind the past, look to the future, reconcile, and find a way to live with each other.
I can’t help but think that in a few years someone will go and educate Palestinians who experienced the horrors of genocide as children about Western-style peacebuilding.
How do they look Palestinians in the eye and tell them there is a lot of truth in the story of the Gaza massacre? How in the world is this supposed to promote peace?
If this is what the West calls peacebuilding today, I don’t want to be part of it.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
