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