Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
was repealed in 1989. Lessons taught in Albanian were then rescinded and
forbidden at the University of Pristina and at other educational institutions
in Kosovo. Because of this, Albanians organized a self-financed education
system, which operated in private locations. In the accounts of Serb IDPs,
however, the political and cultural priority that the Albanians attributed to
an education in their own language was usually dismissed as a sign of spite
and lack of interest in Serbian culture and history. Many of them assumed
that this parallel education system had been created in order to disseminate
an extremist and nationalistic Albanian ideology. The fact that education
in Albanian had actually been forbidden was usually neglected. Many
refugees even claimed that Albanians had more rights than they had, even
when it came to language. As evidence of this, they cited the 1974 constitution,
which indicated that Serbs were forced to learn the Albanian language,
“though they were living on Serb soil”, as many would now put it.
The second such event occurred at the same time, when many Albanian
workers protesting to regain Kosovo’s autonomy, or in the name of broader
human rights issues, were fired from their jobs. In the Serbian accounts,
these people were usually described as having voluntarily refused to work,
and therefore being fully responsible for their unemployment. Finally, the
famous mass-poisoning of Albanian school children that took place around
1991 was universally dismissed as yet another attempt to attract the attention
of the international media in order to promote the cause of a Greater
Albania. On the other hand, the majority of the observers at the time also
dismissed this case as an episode of mass-hysteria, and subsequent analyses
of urine and blood samples confirmed traces of agents such as Sarin,
used in chemical weapons known to be manufactured by the Yugoslav
National Army. The credibility of this dramatic hypothesis was later to be
confirmed by the then federal president of Yugoslavia (the Croatian Stipe
Mesic) and a number of international observers (Clark, 2000: 58; Malcolm
2000: 345).
In attempting to create and sustain a meaningful explanation for, and identity
within, the change from peaceful coexistence to antagonism and war,
the Kosovar Serbian IDPs tended to use narrative resources that projected
responsibility onto an ethnic other. Interestingly, this “other” appears to be
blamed for having shaken a sense of ontological security that was based
on the erasure of diversity in the name of a Serbo-centric unity. Generally,
the Albanians’ claims to wider political involvement and representation
were often dismissed with a wide-reaching conspirative interpretation of
the social, economic and political context in Kosovo. Thus, in Kosovo, the
Albanians were the “real” privileged ones, whereas the “real” victims of
discrimination and abuse were the Serbs. Of course, my aim in defining
such an interpretative framework as “conspirative” is not to deny or con-
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