Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti<br />
Part I<br />
Stories of Conflicts and Enemies<br />
Giuseppe De Sario*<br />
Voices of war<br />
A war took place, a war sparked by bitter political and social conflict that<br />
had begun in the 1980s. These undeniable facts are, of course, to be found<br />
in the interviewees’ stories, but with differing emphases depending on the<br />
chronology of the conflict’s phases that each has created for themselves,<br />
and according to the cognitive framework through which they have given<br />
meaning to these events.<br />
“The Serb people”, “the Albanian people”, “the Roma people”, are phrases<br />
that occur time and again in the stories, sometimes used in the specific<br />
sense of a people, other times, as a generalization for something else, such<br />
as the behaviour or identity of individuals belonging to the group thus<br />
defined. In this paper, our analysis focuses mainly on the accounts of<br />
Kosovar Albanians. Some Roma narratives have been added in order to<br />
break the rigidity of a constructed Serbian-Albanian duality.<br />
The stories had no endings and exuded perceptible tension. Within the<br />
space of a few lines, a bare assertion of the responsibility of the Serbian<br />
people 1 could be followed by distinctions between Serbs near and far,<br />
between civilians and soldiers, and again by a return to the attribution of<br />
collective guilt upon the Serbian people. In so many cases, this blame does<br />
not stem from confusion, from the persistence of trauma, nor from intellectual<br />
incapacity to discern facts. The mechanism that make it so difficult for<br />
these victims to name their own enemies, even for people forced to run<br />
away from real, flesh-and-blood persecutors, revealed indirectly and in<br />
terrible circumstances, the fragility of a definition like ethnic conflict. This<br />
expression, so widespread throughout western media and politics, has<br />
travelled a tortuous path prior to its acceptance in the victims’ reconstruction<br />
of facts, and has never managed to convey all the nuances of what<br />
really happened. The fugitives and younger immigrants find it odd that<br />
belonging to a nationality could have been sufficient grounds to create<br />
* Degree in Contemporary History from the University of Turin, now researcher in social<br />
science at the Institute Aaster of Milan and at the co-operative Antilia of Turin.<br />
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