In her latest book titled Girlhood at War, political science scholar Vjosa Musliu tells the story of the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo, through the eyes of her 12-year-old self. Musliu explains how following the end of the war, international organisations were quick to offer workshops on reconciliation and peacebuilding for Serbs and Albanians who lived 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 the participants were asked to reimagine from the perspective of the wolf.
In the reimagined version, massive deforestation had left the wolf increasingly isolated, so when he met the girl in the red hood, he had not eaten in weeks. Driven by hunger and fear that he might die, the wolf ate the grandmother and the girl.
The story puzzled Musliu and her peers, who struggled at first to understand how hunger could possibly justify the wolf killing the little girl and her grandmother, and second, to see the purpose of this story in a reconciliation workshop. The facilitators explained that the exercise was meant to show that there are many perspectives to every story, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and there could always be different truths.
Absurd as it is, more than 20 years later, I found myself in a very similar situation. In October, I attended a workshop organised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to bring together young women from Kosovo and Serbia and teach them dialogue and peacemaking.
Just like Musliu, we too had a foreign facilitator and several international speakers. This time, they had also added two assistant facilitators, one from Kosovo and one from Serbia; it was clear that both had been given a detailed script to follow, which they could not deviate from.
The first day of the training, we were asked to explain how we understood peace. So we did so by sharing different stories, many of which were traumatic. Some I still cannot stop thinking about. The facilitator seemed less concerned about what we were saying and more preoccupied with us running 15 minutes late. There seemed to be little understanding of the depth of emotions, courage, and vulnerability that those stories carried.
On the second day, we learned about integrative negotiations. One bullet point in the presentation said that negotiation requires “separating the people from the problem”. I read it, and I felt something in my chest; I couldn’t continue reading further.
How do I separate the 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 neighbourhood; when they came back, their home had been broken into, damaged and some items missing – including my mother’s wedding dress. Neighbours told her that Serb soldiers made it a point to burn women’s wedding dresses they found.
In other communities, the crimes went well 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 just a child, only 11 years old. But they marked me. They carved a cross into me and said, ‘This is the memory you’ll keep of us.’ It destroyed me as a child, from the inside. They made those marks on me with a knife,” one survivor recounted.
Knowing this story and so many others, I found it hard to understand how one can tell a group of young women whose family members were displaced, raped, tortured, or killed during the war that the problem has to be separated from the people.
I guess it is easy for foreign facilitators to do so because at the end of a peacemaking workshop, they would take a cab to the airport, fly home and leave behind the survivors still struggling with a transition from war to peace and all the pain in between. I recalled Musliu’s words at the end of her story about peacemaking between the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood: “We should ask them how they would reconcile their differences if the wolf had eaten their grandmothers?”
Throughout the workshop, we were assigned seats in the conference room, where we were mixed, the girls from Kosovo and the girls from Serbia sitting next to each other. However, as soon as the lunch break time came, the attempt to make us sit together and befriend failed, as we sat at different tables.
When asked by the organisers about this division, I responded that the workshop was yet to address the elephant in the room – the war itself. How could we feel there could be resolution and closure without discussing what triggered the war, what happened during it, and how it ended? How could we reconcile if we could not talk about justice?
Every time I wanted to emphasise the complexity of the post-war situation – for example, by bringing up the topic of survivors of sexual violence – there was an intervention from the facilitators who told me “you are not ready yet” to talk about this.
I was furious to hear someone else evaluate my ability to handle a conversation. It is a tone the West often uses when speaking to the rest of the world. We are told we are “not ready” for democracy, “not prepared” for self-governance, “not objective enough” to confront our own past.
Readiness becomes a way to measure civilisation, to decide who can speak and who must listen. In these spaces, “not being ready” is never about emotional strength; it is about power. It is a polite way of saying that our truth is inconvenient, that our pain must wait for translation, moderation, and approval.
It speaks volumes that the workshop organisers claimed to have a focus on gender, but at the same time avoided the topic of rape as a war crime because it surpassed the level of depth – or rather level of superficiality – they had planned in their agenda.
On the fifth day of the training, the facilitator announced that we would talk about historical narratives to understand “different perspectives and different truths, even if we don’t agree with all of them”.
For the organisers, clearly, such an exercise was useful. For me, using perspectives and truths interchangeably was dangerous. It could blur the lines between facts and narratives.
Yes, wars may hold many perspectives and experiences, but truth is not among the things that can be multiplied. Truth, out of all the things, is not a matter of balance or compromise; it rests on evidence, and it is rooted in facts. When we challenge or debate facts, we risk distorting truth; we risk allowing falsehoods to look like reasonable interpretations of history.
And so, I sat on that day, 26 years after the end of the war, listening to a painful, outrageous, and dangerous message: There are many truths to a story. I was told that now we have to move on from the past and look towards the future, reconcile and find a way to live with each other.
I cannot help but think, how in a few years’ time, someone will go and train the Palestinians who experienced genocidal horrors as children on Western-style peacebuilding.
How would they look a Palestinian in the eye and tell them there are many truths to the Gaza genocide story? How on earth would this be promoting peace?
If this is what the West today calls building peace, I do not want to be a part of it.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
