Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
Question: And when you were small, did you have any Serbian
friends, I mean of your own age, who you used to play with?
Teuta: She didn’t but I did, I always had some near, we would play
together; there were a lot of Serb refugees from Krajna and
we became friends even though they were Serbs; they didn’t
have anything to wear, they didn’t have anything and they
would go round the houses asking and we would give them
things, then we would watch videos that they had taken in
Krajna showing what had happened during that war, and
then they would weep, early in 1998, and they told us that
that was starting to happen here too, who knows what’s
going to happen to you too.
Question: So you watched those films together?
Teuta: Yes, and when I left my home too, when I went into the
town, they kissed me and they were weeping; they said we
might never see you again, you could be killed, and they
wept; and when I came back two months later, they were no
longer there.
Narratives about the enemy or about persecutors were highly varied. There
was an enemy-people (enemy Serbs, for instance) who, for the length of
the conflict narrative, took the guise of a collective subject (the enemy
Serbian People). The concept of a national collectivity engaged in an
attack on the rights of a minority and as described from the opposite side,
must, it seems, be included in the story of an oppressed people. Beyond the
exceptions, or apparent exceptions, that described mutual support shared
between people who otherwise would have been adversaries, the stories
also contained rationalizations of the behaviour of the “others”, especially
when this behaviour contrasted with that of the nearest “other” neighbour.
One example of this was the responsibility cast somewhat on the Serbs,
but especially on the “people of Belgrade”. Another example occurred
with the harassment that many Romany were subjected to after the bombing.
Protests were organized specifically against the “Albanians from
Albania”, who allegedly entered Kosovo after the Serbs had left, expelling
the non-Albanian inhabitants and destroying their homes.
As it may be seen, the strategies the subjects used to define the adversary
varied greatly, even in a context of extreme, open, large-scale conflict.
There were no defined war fronts, not even in the minds of the people
involved. A widespread feeling was that of alarm, of disbelief in the escalation
of violence. The first acts of aggression and cruelty were followed
in the narratives by a chain of unexpected events that peaked at the horror
of the NATO war against Yugoslavia and the mass expulsion of Kosovar
Albanians. Almost completely absent, however, at least in the evidence
gathered, was a sense of inevitability in the conflict and in the degeneration
of the events, just as no significant mention was made of matters of
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