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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai
tained by narcissist fantasies of purity and unity. This has many important
implications for the way suffering is experienced and dealt with at a subjective
and collective level.
It is in the light of this encounter between homogeneous and heterogeneous
cognitive frameworks and different libidinal frameworks and narratives,
that events are framed and analysed. Throughout the interviews,
there were very few people whose subjectivity was either completely
embedded or dis-embedded in the nationalist and narcissistic collective
order. Rather, most of the refugees tended to construct a meaningful analysis
of reality by using narratives which were cognitively and libidinally
contradictory. The more contradictory the encounter between the cognitive
and libidinal underpinnings of the cultural resources available to the subjects,
the more the interviewee lacked a coherent and meaningful explanation
of events. Therefore, the more the subject suffered, trying to sustain
and understand his/her permanence and continuity in a meaningful world,
whose apparent unity had been shaken and broken by war and hatred.
From the 1980s and onwards, most of the refugees described a situation of
growing antagonism between Serbs and Albanians, which they generally
experienced as an increase of tension in the workplace, and as episodes of
discrimination against Serbs. Most of the Serbian refugees reported living
with a feeling of general insecurity. Most of them had experienced verbal
hostility and harassment; most had escorted their children to school when
they were forced to cross areas inhabited by Albanians. In the period
following the first Albanian demonstrations until the escalation of hostility
into open conflict between opposing factions in 1998, neighbourly and
work relationships were felt to be “getting cold” and growing formal,
while stories of harassment, rape and kidnapping of Serbs by terrorists
were becoming increasingly frequent. In descriptions of the Serbian-
Albanian coexistence in Kosovo after 1989, it was easy to identify an
ongoing polarization between a public, official world of standard and
correct inter-ethnic relationships, and a private mono-ethnic world where
separation, suspicion, antagonism and hostility grew, fortified by nationalist
discourses and violence promoted by different social actors in the name
of their own political and economic rationales.
In discussing the period between 1989 and 1998, most of the Serbians
mentioned three main events, which were usually blamed on the conscious
efforts of Albanians. According to the accounts of Serb IDPs, the
Albanians had orchestrated? these acts in order to attract the attention of
the international media, with the ultimate aim of preparing the ground for
the secession of Kosovo from Yugoslavia, and the creation of a Greater
Albania. The first of these events came after Kosovo’s autonomous status
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