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Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
Albanians. At this point, the stories even became interchangeable. One
story could replace the other because their progression and themes were so
similar: The arrival of a handful of armed men, the order to leave the
house, often within a few hours or by the following morning – so many
stories included these scenes. The tales told by the Kosovar Albanians,
however, contained added chilling twists, especially if they took place in
the countryside. Their narratives of expulsion from homes and villages
included scenes of execution or macabre games, where communities were
sometimes rounded up and herded into town squares or football fields.
Throughout the area of the battlefields, complex mechanisms converge to
result in the construction of “ethnic groups”. The new identification of a
group with labels like “the enemy” and/or “the victim” is fundamental to
these processes. This is why it seems more appropriate to refer to populations
and not peoples, at least in reference to Kosovo and the constructions
instrumental to what happened there. Even when the terms “people”
and “population” coincide and, for instance, when the term “refugees”
coincides with “Kosovar Albanians”, “Kosovar Serbs”, or “Romany”, it
must not be forgotten that these are not natural identities but words, albeit
words that confer identity. Writing of this, Michel Foucault has maintained
that contemporary power systems based on “bio-power”, even when aimed
at the destruction of an enemy, or the power to decide whether he will live
or die, end up exerting an active influence in life, defining its outlines and
meanings. 2 In other words, these technical and bio-political policies of
identification could lead to nothing but a definition of “expendable life”.
Where power is granted over these lives, death becomes a possible outcome
which is neither illegal nor immoral, and at the end of this path we
find mass murder as one result of this process of identification. One example
of this occurred in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe. German Jews were
de-nationalized, 3 then de-specified, and thus was a people reduced to a
population of “terrorists”, “refugees”, “clandestine immigrants” – or civilian
collateral to the objectives of war. In the final stages of this mechanism,
a population, though still men and women, fall into the state of silent
non-persons. 4
In real terms, in the Kosovo conflict, each individual was separated from
his neighbour, and every group was distanced from the other cultural, linguistic
and religious groups, until all came to be seen as belonging to one
of the two opposing camps. Whoever was known to be a good man or was
a childhood, school or workplace friend, gradually or suddenly disappeared
without any parting words or final explanations. Though exceptions
do exist where victims helped one another, materially and morally,
despite their differences, the suffering of the early refugees were only a
preview of what would soon happen to Kosovo.
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