Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai<br />
firm any of the assertions or interpretations of events, but to underline<br />
how, in this explanation, the responsibility of the politics and policies of<br />
the Serb state are minimized through the deployment of narratives of discrimination<br />
and self-victimization. An analysis of the narratives used by<br />
Serbian IDPs reveals that self-victimization, denial, and conspiracy are the<br />
three prevalent psychological and identitary strategies. These are generally<br />
deployed to protect the Serbian collectivist identity according to its perceived<br />
moral superiority. In the explanations provided by Serb IDPs, the<br />
Albanians have paradoxically been blamed for the injustices and inequalities<br />
caused by a political and social system that was itself entirely<br />
involved in an articulation of Serbian identity, which legitimized the<br />
Serbs’ privileged entitlement in the name of their perceived moral<br />
superiority.<br />
According to Renata Salecl’s analysis of the rise of nationalism in Eastern<br />
Europe’ s post-communist countries, any form of “national identification”<br />
with “our own kind” is based on the fantasy of an enemy; an alien that has<br />
insinuated itself into “our society” and that constantly threatens us with<br />
habits, discourse and rituals that are not of “our kind”. The perceived<br />
threat here is that “the ‘Other’ will not find enjoyment in the same way as<br />
we do.” With his different way of finding pleasure,<br />
The Other further outrages our sense of the kind of nation our would like<br />
to live in. He/she steals our enjoyment. To this must be added that this<br />
Other is always an other in my interior, i.e. that my hatred of the Other is<br />
really the hatred of the part (the surplus) of my own enjoyment which I<br />
find unbearable and cannot acknowledge, and which I therefore transpose<br />
(“project”) into the Other via a fantasy of the “Others’ enjoyment”<br />
(Salecl, 1993: 105, emphasis in text).<br />
For the refugees, questioning the Yugoslavian-Serbo-centric social and<br />
cultural order would have meant de-stabilizing and breaking the narcissist<br />
fantasies of moral superiority which had sustained them individually. Thus<br />
the possibility of a critical approach had been repressed and responsibility<br />
projected onto an ethnicized other. It therefore came as no surprise that<br />
when analysing the period of growing antagonism between Serbs and<br />
Albanians from the demonstrations of 1981 to the outbreak of war in 1999,<br />
Albanians were deemed responsible for:<br />
• Spreading narratives of manipulation in cooperation with foreign anti-<br />
Serbian forces;<br />
• Organizing strategic fictions such as the massive strikes (they were<br />
allegedly not fired, but decided to quit their jobs) and the mass poisonings<br />
(they were faking it to achieve international attention);<br />
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