In her latest book titled Childhood in warPolitical science scholar Vjosa Musliu tells the story of the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo through the eyes of her 12-year-old son. Musliu explains that after the end of the war, international organizations were quick to offer workshops on reconciliation and peacebuilding for Serbs and Albanians living in Kosovo.
In the final chapter, “Little Red Riding Hood,” she describes one such session she attended as a teenager in 2002. Led by facilitators from Belgium and the United Kingdom, the workshop began with the story of Little Red Riding Hood, which participants were asked to reimagine from the wolf’s perspective.
In the reimagined version, the wolf has become increasingly isolated due to massive deforestation, so when he meets the girl in the red hood, he hasn’t eaten in weeks. Out of hunger and fear that he would die, the wolf ate the grandmother and daughter.
The story confused Musliu and her peers, who struggled to understand how hunger could justify a wolf killing the little girl and her grandmother and, secondly, to see the story’s purpose in the reconciliation workshop. The facilitators explained that the exercise was intended to show that every story has multiple perspectives, that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and that there can always be a different truth.
More than 20 years later, I find myself in a very similar situation. In October, I attended a workshop organized by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to bring together young women from Kosovo and Serbia and teach them about dialogue and peace.
Like Musliu, we also had a foreign facilitator and several international speakers. At this time, they also added two assistant facilitators, one from Kosovo and one from Serbia; It was clear that both were given a detailed script to follow, from which they could not deviate.
On the first day of training we were asked to describe how we understood peace. So we did so by sharing different stories, many of which were traumatic. Something I still can’t stop thinking about. The facilitator seemed less concerned with what we were talking about and more engaged when running 15 minutes late. Less understood is the depth of emotion, courage and vulnerability contained in those stories.
The next day, we learned about integrative negotiation. A bullet point in the presentation said that negotiations needed to “separate the people from the problem.” I read it and felt something in my chest; I couldn’t continue reading any further.
How do I separate people from the problem when I know what happened to my family and my community during the war? My parents were forced to flee to Albania before Serb forces entered their area; When they returned, their house was a wreck, damaged and missing items – including my mother’s wedding dress. Neighbors told her that Serb soldiers tried to burn the wedding dresses of the women they found.
In other communities, crime went beyond broken homes. more than 8,000 ethnic Albanian citizens killed or forcibly disappeared; More than 20,000 girls, boys, women and men Raped.
“At the time of the rape, I was trying to save myself – I was just a child, only 11 years old. But they marked me. They carved a cross on me and said, ‘You will keep this memory for us.’ It destroyed me inside as a child. They made those marks on me with a knife,” said a survivor.
Knowing this story and many others, I find it hard to understand how a group of young women whose family members have been displaced, raped, tortured or killed during war can tell that the problem has to be separated from the public.
I guess it’s easy for foreign facilitators to do that because at the end of the peacebuilding workshop, they’ll take a cab to the airport, fly home, and leave behind the survivors struggling with the transition from war to peace and all the pain in between. I remembered Musliu’s words at the end of her story about making peace between the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood: “We should ask them how they would settle their differences if the wolf had eaten their grandmothers?”
Throughout the workshop, we were given seats in the conference room, where we mingled, with girls from Kosovo and girls from Serbia sitting next to each other. However, when it came time for lunch break, trying to get us to sit together and make friends by sitting at different tables failed.
When asked by the organizers about this segment, I replied that the workshop wanted to address the elephant in the room – war itself. How can we expect a resolution and closure without discussing what started the war, what happened during it, and how it ended? If we cannot talk about justice, how can there be reconciliation?
Every time I wanted to emphasize the complexity of the post-war situation—for example, by taking up the topic of survivors of sexual violence—I was interrupted by facilitators who told me “you’re not ready yet” to talk about it.
Hearing someone else evaluate my ability to handle a conversation made me very angry. It is a tone that Westerners use when speaking to the rest of the world. We are told that we are “not ready” for democracy, “not ready” for self-rule, “not objective enough” to face our own past.
Readiness becomes a way of measuring civility, of deciding who can speak and who must listen. In these spaces, “not being ready” is never about emotional strength; It’s about power. It’s a polite way of saying that our truth is inconvenient, that our pain has to wait for translation, patience and acceptance.
The organizers of the workshop claimed to focus on gender, but at the same time avoided the topic of rape as a war crime because it exceeded the level of depth – or rather the surface level – they had planned on their agenda.
On the fifth day of the training, the facilitator announced that we would “talk about historical stories to understand different perspectives and different truths, even if we don’t agree with all of them”.
For the organizers, obviously, such an exercise was useful. For me, it was dangerous to use perspectives and truths interchangeably. It can blur the lines between fact and fiction.
Yes, wars can have multiple perspectives and experiences, but truth cannot be multiplicity. Truth, of all things, is not a matter of balance or compromise; It depends on the evidence, and it is in the facts. When we challenge or debate facts, we risk distorting the truth; We risk making falsification seem like a reasonable interpretation of history.
And so, I sat that day, 26 years after the end of the war, listening to a painful, humiliating and dangerous message: There are many truths in one story. I was told that now we have to move on from the past and look to the future, reconcile and find a way to live with each other.
I can’t help but think how, in a few years, someone will go and train Palestinians who experienced the horrors of genocide as children in Western-style peacebuilding.
How will they look the Palestinians in the eye and tell them that there are many truths to the story of the Gaza genocide? How will this promote peace on earth?
If this is what the West calls peacemaking today, I don’t want to be a part of it.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.