Insane
I don't want this blog to be all black - I do want you to come back - but this problem has been troubling me.
There have been 390 suicides since 2000 in Kosovo. Here is the breakdown:
2000 - 33 suicides
2001 - 59
2002 - 48
2003 - 76
2004 - 63
2005 - 53
2006 - 54, 169 attempts
Jan-Feb 07 - 12
(RTK)
It used to be a big deal, now it's just a number. Also, the difference now is that the victims are usually young males among Albanians and old males among Serbs. Many of them are in rural areas.
Link to RTK (sq)
3 comments:
Owen,
I haven't read Durkheim. Albania has the most amazing polyglots in Europe yet some horribly translated major works. Albanian is poor in modern vocabulary and our ethnic kin in Tirana are happy to borrow indiscriminately.
I hadn't thought of the "cause" as the reason to persevere - sounds plausible.
I can think of these other reasons: 1) People now seem to be more competitive and less social. 2) Population movements changed family support nets and predictability that was there before.
3) Villages bore the brunt of the war burden.
Suicide didn't fit with the communist ideology which considered it a trait of the alienated members of a capitalist society. 10-15 years later same professors would be teaching so there was never a chance to have those books introduced in the academia. You can study the reaction to the suicide of Albania's PM Mehmet Shehu after he fell out with Hoxha. He escaped, but his character was trashed even after death.
The giving up of the anti-colonial individual on the struggle wouldn't fit with the party line. You can see this view in El Otro Francisco, a superb Cuban film.
So to conclude, communism didn't tolerate suicide neither from its friends nor its "internal enemies." And I'm blaming those old professors for not introducing the book.
It's not that long ago (up to 1961) that suicide and attempted suicide were still a crime in England and Wales. I think that was based on the idea that the citizen's life life did not belong to himself or herself but to the state.
Communism's attitude to suicide was perhaps similar in essence to the religious proscription. From a communist perspective suicide was philosophically a rejection of society by the individual in the way that a religious perspective sees it as a rejection of the redemptory power of faith.
All in all, it's reassuring that there are some ways in which we are a little less cruel in our attitudes these days.
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