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