Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
• All Albanians wanted a Greater Albania but they would not have acted
without the greater power(s) that manipulated them from backstage;
• “Maybe my neighbours were not to blame. We are not to blame either,
so someone else makes people act violently”;
• The Serbian politicians and civil servants of Kosovo were corrupt, but
it was the Albanians who “did it”.
In order to come to a conclusion about the psychological and social
implications of these hegemonic discursive narratives of conspiracy and
self-victimization, it might be useful to compare these with a similar list of
narratives in conversations of different kinds that I was involved with in
rump Yugoslavia while coordinating the interviewing phase. It should be
remembered here that in Serbia, the construction of self-victimizing narratives
might be seen as the corner stone in the construction of individual or
collective identities. These narratives recur across all political divisions
present in the society. In the many conversations and interviews heard,
held or collected in Serbia, perhaps the most striking feature was this particular
selection of narratives that has been used to give meaning to wars
and other events occurring during the last ten years of Serbian history:
• “Serbia has always been on the right side of history and is always
unjustly losing the battle against the evil ‘others’ that wanted to conquer
what was ‘ours’ (the Turks, the Nazi Croats and fascist Italians,
and now, the Albanian nationalists)”;
• Narratives of decadence and nostalgia of a past glory: “[Under Tito] we
had everything, we were great”;
• Complaints of current international isolation, as compared to a mythical
(recent) past when a Yugoslav citizen could go from Moscow to
New York without a visa;
• Pity exclusively or mainly for the Serbian victims of war;
• Narratives of extermination and victimization as one more element in
the continuous history/fate of the Serbian people,: in relation to the
assaults of the Turks, the Ustasha Croats, the Nationalist Albanians, and
now of NATO;
• Conspiracy theories about the USA and NATO: that they harbour a
secret agreement with the Albanians and with Serbian president
Slobodan Milosevic with the intention of dismembering Serbia;
• Blame for the crumbling of Yugoslavia placed either on backward and
ungrateful Kosovo and Macedonia, or on greedy Slovenia and Croatia;
103