Terrorism, Trauma, and the Search for Redemption

Maier-Witt came to Kosovo in 2000, hired by Germany's Civil Peace Service, which was looking for psychologists to work with trauma victims. The CPS was worried that a well-known revolutionary might not be the right person to work toward building peace, but like Germany itself, Maier-Witt had had invaluable experience in coming to terms with a hideous past.

This morning she is headed to work with members of the Kosovo Women's Initiative (KWI), a volunteer organization established in July 1999 to help war-affected, displaced, and traumatized women and their families. The KWI, says Maier-Witt, "is for women of all nationalities." Now she is pulling into a United Nations compound fenced in by barbed wire. Eight women are waiting for her; she will train them to evaluate business plans for ventures that can rebuild their society. What kind of businesses do they want to start? How can they create the society and the future that they want? And, most important, how can they rise above the day-to-day reality of their lives to give birth to a new vision?

Many of the women waiting for Maier-Witt have spent months locked in their houses while the war in Kosovo raged. One Albanian woman walked the length of Kosovo looking for food for her children after the Serbs dragged her husband from their home and put him into a detention camp. Now Maier-Witt is asking these women to dream. "Vision," says one woman, trying to understand the concept as it relates to a business. "It's the same problem with pregnancy: How do you raise the baby once it's born?"

Maier-Witt introduces the women to drafting business plans, an exercise that calls on them to believe that the future can be different from the present. She distributes a set of mock business plans: a women's legal service; a hot line that women can call when they're under threat, domestically or financially; a radio station. They are to review the plans, choose one that they could imagine implementing, and explain their choice.

The women break into two groups to make their evaluations. They already have some experience with startups: One of their ventures, Fantazia, a hairdressing project, opened in November 1999. With a budget of DM 9,500, or about $4,400, Fantazia trained 58 women to get jobs or to work on their own as hairdressers. Other projects funded by the KWI include small entrepreneurial ventures that produce pies, cookies, toys, and toilet paper; there is also a weaving factory, a fitness club, and a restaurant. This group today spends an hour working through the business plans, then critiquing their own analyses. At the end of a few hours of self-direction and self-criticism, they sound like venture capitalists. Here, too, Maier-Witt is careful not to impose her way on these women, but to hone skills they already have. She is intent on leaving few traces of her presence.

Back in the van, Maier-Witt begins the drive to a Serbian village, a town so small and the women so isolated that they can barely feed their families. "The decision to take up this job is in keeping with what I always did, but in a different way," she says. "When I came to Kosovo, I saw that the Albanians, repressed so long by the Serbs, never really had a chance. They need a chance to develop, even if they did bad things."

Is she reflecting on her own experience, her own time spent "doing bad things"? "Even a murderer is a human being," Maier-Witt says. "I learned this in prison. It doesn't help to be disgusted. A criminal is not different from you. You have the potential to be the same under certain circumstances. The most important thing is to be objective. If the Serbs see me being friendly to the Albanians, or vice versa, then they'll distrust me. If each side accepts me, then I feel that I can bring them together. Whatever each side appreciates in me means they have a link."

Sometimes, it turns out, in this war-ravaged land, what the two sides appreciate about Maier-Witt is her own personal history as a revolutionary. What then? What happens when the most attractive part of Maier-Witt's story is the part she is working the hardest to atone for? "When people relate to my history," she says thoughtfully, "they sometimes are excited by it. They think I dared to do something they only dream about doing -- which isn't true. My radical days were a weakness. I feel bad about being famous for something that is not bravery, but weakness. But if you are true to yourself and see the weaknesses you have, you are more able to listen to other people's stories."

When she gets to the Serbian village, another group of women waits. The rest of Maier-Witt's day will consist of more counseling, punctuated by glasses of slivovitz to drink and little cakes to eat. The women have knitted three sweater-vests, and Maier-Witt buys one.