Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
social hierarchies, inconceivable that this could be the motive for crimes
and massacres:
…When first I heard of atrocities [referring here to the war in Croatia],
because if you heard of some soldier dying in the war in a shoot-out, that
is alas normal, the first time at Plitvice – do you know where that is? A
really nice town by the way – on the television we saw civilians whose
eyes had been put out by Serbs and we could not believe that it had really
happened, we could hardly even believe the television news, there
must have been a reason behind it we thought; and then it turned out that
it had actually happened, but even worse… [Altin]
Massacres, when I heard tell of massacres, I hoped that it wasn’t true.
[Margherita]
It is not a coincidence that until physical contact took place, until they
were face to face with a tangible “enemy”, policeman, bureaucrat or paramilitary,
many people perceived the enemy as hiding beyond the borders
that had brought them close to their neighbours, whether these neighbours
were Albanian, Serbs or Romany.
“I didn’t want to believe it”, was the reaction that many expressed when
they heard of atrocities committed against defenceless people, a mirror
reaction to the dismay they felt before the perpetrator of violence: “You!?
So why me?” This terrible consternation comes both from knowing the
identity of the persecutor, a person who had not been thought capable of
harm, and from realizing one’s own condition, as victim. At a certain point,
personal history ceases: this was expressed by a Rom engineer who was
dismissed in the early 1990s for not collaborating with the government,
and later expelled after the NATO intervention, by the armed groups who
followed on the heels of the Liberation Army.
At a certain point Kosovo is occupied, and then everybody who worked
for a State company had to sign one of their… forms, recognizing the
State and Serbia. Anybody who did not sign this was out of a job… and
that is what happened to me personally because I was the only Rom engineer
in Kosovo working there… They had always tried to push me into
signing this recognition for Serbia and then, how do you say, to be undervalued
by them… that is what I refuse to do… in fact more than refusing,
I did not want to be that way because I saw it was not right… [Tahir]
This surprise before unexpected violence and the end of personal history
also occurred when entire families received sudden orders to leave their
homes. First, Albanian families were thrown out by Serbian soldiers or
paramilitaries, then Roma families were forced to flee by armed
155