In the final chapter, “Little Red Riding Hood”, she describes a séance 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 re-imagine from the wolf’s perspective.
In the reimagined version, massive deforestation had left the wolf increasingly isolated, so when he met the red-hooded girl, he had not eaten for several weeks. Out of hunger and fear that he might die, the wolf ate the grandmother and the girl.
The story shocked Musliu and his companions, who struggled, firstly, to understand how hunger could possibly justify a wolf killing the little girl and her grandmother, and secondly, to see the purpose of this story in a reconciliation workshop. The facilitators explained that the purpose of the exercise was to show that every story has multiple perspectives, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and there can always be different truths.
As absurd as it is, more than 20 years later, I found myself in exactly the same situation. In October, I participated in 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 dialogue and peacebuilding.
Like Musliu, we also had a foreign facilitator and several international speakers. This time, he also added two assistant facilitators, one from Kosovo and one from Serbia; It was clear that the duo were given a detailed script to follow, from which they could not deviate.
On the first day of the training, we were asked to explain how we understand peace. So we did this by sharing different stories, many of which were painful. Some I still can’t stop thinking about. The facilitator was less concerned about what we were saying and more concerned with our being 15 minutes late. There seems to be little understanding of depth of emotion, courage and sensitivity in those stories.
On the second day, we learned about integrative dialogue. A bullet point in the presentation said negotiations needed to “separate people from the problem.” I read it, and I felt something in my chest; I could not continue reading further.
How can 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 Albania before Serb forces entered their neighborhood; When they returned, their house had been broken into, damaged and some items were missing – including my mother’s wedding dress. Neighbors told him that the Serb soldiers decided to burn the wedding dresses of the women they found.
In other communities, the crimes 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 just a child, only 11 years old. But they made a mark on me. They made a cross on me and said, ‘This is the memory you will remember about us.’ It destroyed me from the inside as a child. They made these marks on me with knives,” said one survivor.
After learning of this story and many others, I found it difficult to understand how one could tell a group of young women whose family members were displaced, raped, tortured, or killed during the war that the problem had to be separated from the people.
I think this is easy for foreign facilitators to do because at the end of the peacebuilding workshop, they will take a taxi to the airport, fly home and leave behind survivors who are still struggling with the transition from war to peace and all the pain in between. I was reminded of Musliu’s words at the end of her story about the peacemaking between the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood: “We must ask them how they would have resolved their differences if the wolf had eaten their grandmother?”
During the entire workshop, we were given seats in the conference room, where we were mixed up, girls from Kosovo and girls from Serbia sitting next to each other. However, as soon as it was time for lunch break, the attempt to seat us together and make friends failed, as we sat at different tables.
When the organizers asked about this divide, I responded that the workshop had not yet addressed the elephant in the room – the war itself. How can we realize that there can be resolution and closure without discussing what caused the war to begin, what happened during it, and how it ended? How can we reconcile if we cannot talk about justice?
Every time I wanted to emphasize the complexity of the post-war situation – for example, by bringing up the topic of survivors of sexual violence – there was intervention from facilitators who told me “you are not ready to talk about this yet”.
I was angry to hear that someone else was evaluating my ability to handle a conversation. This is the tone the West often uses when speaking to the rest of the world. We are told that we are “not ready” for democracy, “not ready” for self-governance, “not purposeful enough” to confront our past.
Urgency becomes a way to measure civility, to decide who can speak and who must listen. In these places, “not being prepared” is never about emotional strength; It’s about power. It’s a polite way of saying that our truth is uncomfortable, that our pain must wait for translation, moderation, and approval.
It speaks volumes that the workshop organizers claimed to focus on gender, but also avoided the topic of rape as a war crime because it exceeded the level of depth – or rather the level of superficiality – they had planned on 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 organizers, clearly, such practice was useful. To me, it was dangerous to use perspective and truth interchangeably. This can blur the lines between facts and narratives.
Yes, there may be many viewpoints and experiences in wars, but truth is not one of those things that can be multiplied. Truth, of all things, is not a matter of balance or compromise; It’s based on evidence, and it’s rooted in facts. When we challenge or debate facts, we risk distorting the truth; We risk letting a lie look like a reasonable interpretation of history.
And so, 26 years after the end of the war, I sat that day, hearing 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 wonder how in a few years, someone will go and train Western-style peacebuilding to Palestinians who experienced the horrors of genocide as children.
How will they look a Palestinian in the eyes and tell them that there are many truths to the story of the Gaza massacre? How will this promote peace?
If the West calls it peacebuilding today, I don’t want to be a part of it.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Al Jazeera.
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