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Many refugees also pointed out how both Serbs’ current exterior and
superficial attitude towards religion, and their past pride in rejecting it in
Communist times, have engendered in the people characteristics such as
“coldness”, “greed” and “envy”, these attitudes being ultimately responsible
for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia into antagonism and war. Many
people actually underlined how Albanians, by having always kept their traditions
and religions, appeared to be more united and prone to solidarity
both amongst themselves and towards the Serbs than the Serbian people
were. Some of the refugees even claimed to praise and envy the Albanians
for this. Finally, the role of the Orthodox Church also elicited criticism, as
most of the refugees believed it to have been too deeply involved in politics.
To some, this meant that the Church should not have supported
Milosevic’s government, while to others the Church should have supported
it more, by not distancing itself as much from the regime. These last,
however, were very few.
As far as the future of Serbia and Yugoslavia was concerned, all of the
refugees, including the people whose conspirative accounts blamed
Europe and the West for everything that happened to Serbia historically,
saw Serbia’s integration into Europe as the only solution that could bring
durable stability and peace to the country. In discussing the future of
Kosovo, most Serbian refugees expressed a strong desire to return there
eventually, while at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of
doing so, after the tragic events of war, ethnicized antagonism and displacement.
Section H, Narratives of sameness and otherness
Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
In Section H, we sought to elicit accounts of past and present experiences
of coexistence between ethnic groups through the question:
11(h) Do you remember a time when relationships between the different
ethnic groups in the area you were living were not conflictive? Did
the situation change? When? How? Why?
The interviewees answered as follows:
We were fine, we said good morning, good evening, I was doing mine;
he was doing his, we did not have any problem. [(S6): Serb woman, aged
59, married, and mother of two. The subject was a housewife from a rural
environment. At the time of the interview, she lived in a collective
accommodation centre, with her husband].
No, the neighbours didn’t. What’s more, they were there to help you, to
help you out of the city, in case they had a car. The neighbours helped us
a lot. While those, those new groups, not Shiptars who lived there but
Albanians from Albania…. [(V2): Serb woman, aged 18. The subject
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