Monday 9 January 2012

Aggression in Albania III: Outside…

Part III of the touching and disquieting essay on aggression in Albania 1997, written by an anonymous 17-year old. The thesis of the essay is that ‘Everybody who is exposed to political violence, is psychologically traumatized’.

People were terrified even though they themselves were the ones to create all this hell. All you could see was people shooting from the balconies, from the streets, from corners of buildings, and a few ones that were caught in the middle of the street and used to run to escape any possible bullets.

I remember myself staring out of the window like a prisoner. Outside my courtyard there was a gipsy family. The man was an alcoholic and was always drunk. He took out a Kalashnikov and started to shoot toward our windows. I sat under the bed. He was that very drunk that he couldn’t understand he was shooting at the direction of the apartments. After a while, I went to see my neighbors and they told me that while having lunch, they heard a crash in the window of their kitchen. They had spotted that the window was shot by a bullet, and it entered into the couch in the living room. It was a miracle that they had no casualties, because they were eating in the table close to the window. The gipsy man continued to fire the gun. Afterwards, he entered into a bar with the Kalashnikov in his arms. All of a sudden, I could see him flying out of the door as in the movies of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill. The Special Forces were inside the bar and when they saw him in, they threw him out. It was a funny thing to watch, but it could have been very tragic.

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