Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
labels [like] “semi-developed”, “semi-colonial”, “semi-civilized” and
“semi-oriental” (Teodorova 1997: 16). What is interesting to our research
is the degree of the Serbian IDPs awareness of this semi-colonial status
and the extent to which these external definitions of them as a people “inbetween”
have been internalized or rejected.
For a population or its members to adhere to a narcissistic and repressive
collectivist order, narratives of conspiracy, hetero-definition and selfvictimization
are essential strategies. They allow for the maintenance of a
social and cultural order where identity and responsibility are searched for
and found mainly without. In other words, identities and responsibilities
are formed in relation (or contrast) to external and omnipotent sets of
power relations, symbols and moral norms, such as Communism, the
West, Europe, Islam, Albanian expansionism, etc. Within such a social and
cultural order, the subject does not, however, define his/her-self by looking
within, by starting from his/her libidinal engagement with the local
sociocultural environment. This point becomes important in analysing the
way in which, in the refugees’ narratives, the notion of being Serb is usually
opposed to that of being Yugoslav. When asked about their understanding
of the transformation from being Yugoslav to being Serb, many
refugees described Serbian people as those who, of all Yugoslav nations,
were the most victimized by Communism in being prevented from
expressing their feelings of national belonging or their spirituality though
faith or religion. From the analysis of most of these narratives it emerges
how Serbs have differentiated themselves from Yugoslavs through reinvention
and re-discovery of practices, customs and mythical discourses
of past glory and sacrifice, some of which are traced back to a founding
myth: the battle of Kosovo Polje. Interestingly, here one might also see
how the hegemony of Serbs in the omnipotent Yugoslav Communist Party,
(which had secured and maintained a position of power and privilege for
the Serbs within Former Yugoslavia), is reinterpreted in self-victimizing
terms, both projecting outwards and denying responsibility for the consequences
of having held on to the desire to maintain a position of privilege
in the name of a perceived moral superiority.
This dynamic is evident even in many fine academic studies where Serbs
are usually seen as having been “traumatized” by the Communist Party,
exactly because of their hegemony within it and of its hegemony in Serbia
(Papov, 2000). In this respect, discourses of traumatization can be associated
to those of self-victimization, in that they are both narrative strategies
intended to divert and minimize responsibility at the individual and
collective levels, by projecting it onto an “other” group. Thus, through
these narrative strategies a political elite controlled by Serbs is simplistically
being blamed for the victimization of Serbs in the first place. Thus
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