Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
refugees. Moreover, in therapeutic sessions held in contemporary Kosovo,
both narrator and listener tended to share the same homogeneous narratives
and fantasies of Albanian ethnic unity and victimization. This, surely,
would prevent that therapeutic space from accepting heterogeneous and
democracy-compatible narratives, nor the pluralist articulations of self,
society and justice that would follow. As it is, every single social problem
typically has been and is being projected onto the very presence of either
the Serbian or the Albanian other. This process avoids the question of the
political and institutional instruments and forms that should be provided
and developed for the creation of a democratic Kosovar society.
In contemporary Kosovo, society still tends to be presented as unified and
homogenous through the suppression and erasure of important internal
elements of social differentiation such as gender, age, education and
degree of urbanization, in the name of the perceived need to emphasize the
differences between the ethnic same and its other: this time the previously
dominating Serbs. In other words, what is really at stake here is the very
possibility of building a pluralist and democratic future for Kosovo under
the shadow of the unchallenged hegemony of homogeneous thought,
which has permeated the sociocultural experience of most people in every
ethnic group. Consider how few are the Kosovar Albanians who are
actually critical of the role that a section of the KLA still plays in controlling
the trafficking of drugs and people in the region, or who oppose the
systematic violence and hatred enforced against the few Serbs who have
remained. On the contrary, a large part of the population believes that the
difficult economic and social situation Kosovo now finds itself in stems
from the fact that international forces are preventing the total exclusion of
Serbs from the territory, thus preventing the complete realization of a “real
Kosovar” traditionalized and re-patriarchalized identity.
In Serbia, of course, the situation in early 2000 was very different, as a
substantial section of the country was increasingly critical of the political
posture advocated by the nationalist regime. Having seen through the
cracks, contradictions and inconsistencies of the explanations and
accounts provided by official discourse, these people were trying to harness
a conflict that had long been ethnicized and therefore de-politicized,
for clearly political purposes, back into the realm of politics, where it
belonged. In the first half of the year 2000, Serbia was a country where a
new heterogeneous conformation of local culture was being constructed
and diffused, countering the hegemony of nationalist discourse and social
practices. This difference between Kosovo and Serbia was particularly
clear to me when I worked with NGOs assisting displaced persons. Many
of the people working for these organizations were Croatian-Serbs or
Bosnian-Serbs, and had directly experienced the political and social con-
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