Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
blood, history, or land as irreversible and unavoidable factors of tension).
In any case, even before these deep-seated questions found their way into
the narratives, a retrospective “psychology” had taken root, to erode the
multi-ethnic fabric:
Back in 1981 a lot of people died in the protests, then you know you
could see that Serbia had done the things that were seen; you know where
we lived only a very small percentage were Serbs, but you could see they
all had a job; as soon as a Serb finished middle school, he could get a job
if he wanted to work, but in the Kosovo families, and there were a real
lot of them and in many families maybe not even one or perhaps just one
had a job… so how come they got all the jobs? …and if then an Albanian
quarrelled with a Serb… you were scared to quarrel with a Serb that the
police would get you; of course, there’s a psychological side to it… he’s
a Serb? Ah well I can’t say anything; it had been like this since 1981.
[Altin]
In memories of a time “before it all started”, on the other hand, there was
a certain amount of negotiation; the peaceful diversity of the past was
often underplayed or overplayed, and could be described with greater or
lesser emphasis on relationships established with “others” (as they
appeared in the narratives), before they became the “enemy”. Coming to
hate the adversary, making him out to be an enemy indistinguishable from
his peers, on the other hand, has proven less easy than was imagined. The
no-longer belligerent “other”, like the Serb of today, who keeps guard
beyond the borders of the region, worsens and amplifies the hate aimed at
the enclaves of Kosovo which are still inhabited by the Serbs and Romany,
and yet, at least in the minds of the interviewees, it was only through a tormented
path that they arrived at vague though negative definitions of the
adversary. Many interviewees, on the contrary, explicitly avoided generalizations,
allocating individual responsibility to the aggressors from each
group; those that were old acquaintances, those of State armed forces, and
those of the paramilitary groups. They also, however, claimed to understand
the hatred felt by their fellow citizens, neighbours and relatives who
had been subjected to terrible violence:
158
…There are all those desperate cases too; I happened to visit a family
where 46 people had lived in the same house; it was a big house, very
big, and there were only three people left. That meant that somebody had
come, lined them up in front of the house and shot them. There’s no way
you can tell that person that this Serb here didn’t do him any harm; he’s
beyond reasoning because he said to me, “I don’t care a thing about
Kosovo or the republic, I don’t care anything about anybody, I don’t care
whether I live or not because there were 46 people including a child and
an old woman”. That means 43 people were all killed in an instant in
front of the house… just imagine how much they can hate a Serb… that
is, a Serb can’t have any future in Kosovo… [Gjolek]