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 />
Albanians. At this point, the stories even became interchangeable. One<br />
story could replace the other because their progression and themes were so<br />
similar: The arrival of a handful of armed men, the order to leave the<br />
house, often within a few hours or by the following morning – so many<br />
stories included these scenes. The tales told by the Kosovar Albanians,<br />
however, contained added chilling twists, especially if they took place in<br />
the countryside. Their narratives of expulsion from homes and villages<br />
included scenes of execution or macabre games, where communities were<br />
sometimes rounded up and herded into town squares or football fields.<br />
Throughout the area of the battlefields, complex mechanisms converge to<br />
result in the construction of “ethnic groups”. The new identification of a<br />
group with labels like “the enemy” and/or “the victim” is fundamental to<br />
these processes. This is why it seems more appropriate to refer to populations<br />
and not peoples, at least in reference to Kosovo and the constructions<br />
instrumental to what happened there. Even when the terms “people”<br />
and “population” coincide and, for instance, when the term “refugees”<br />
coincides with “Kosovar Albanians”, “Kosovar Serbs”, or “Romany”, it<br />
must not be forgotten that these are not natural identities but words, albeit<br />
words that confer identity. Writing of this, Michel Foucault has maintained<br />
that contemporary power systems based on “bio-power”, even when aimed<br />
at the destruction of an enemy, or the power to decide whether he will live<br />
or die, end up exerting an active influence in life, defining its outlines and<br />
meanings. 2 In other words, these technical and bio-political policies of<br />
identification could lead to nothing but a definition of “expendable life”.<br />
Where power is granted over these lives, death becomes a possible outcome<br />
which is neither illegal nor immoral, and at the end of this path we<br />
find mass murder as one result of this process of identification. One example<br />
of this occurred in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe. German Jews were<br />
de-nationalized, 3 then de-specified, and thus was a people reduced to a<br />
population of “terrorists”, “refugees”, “clandestine immigrants” – or civilian<br />
collateral to the objectives of war. In the final stages of this mechanism,<br />
a population, though still men and women, fall into the state of silent<br />
non-persons. 4<br />
In real terms, in the Kosovo conflict, each individual was separated from<br />
his neighbour, and every group was distanced from the other cultural, linguistic<br />
and religious groups, until all came to be seen as belonging to one<br />
of the two opposing camps. Whoever was known to be a good man or was<br />
a childhood, school or workplace friend, gradually or suddenly disappeared<br />
without any parting words or final explanations. Though exceptions<br />
do exist where victims helped one another, materially and morally,<br />
despite their differences, the suffering of the early refugees were only a<br />
preview of what would soon happen to Kosovo.<br />
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