Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
The enemy described by those who had lived in the countryside was often
a person “from the next village” just a few kilometres away. He often lived
just far enough not to enter the interviewees’ direct experience, especially
in the accounts of younger women and children. In the accounts of interviewees
in their forties and fifties, however, relationships with people living
in the next village are remembered differently: interactions between
villages are recalled as friendly, with both sets of inhabitants buying and
selling from one another for the common benefit of all. These interviewees
remembered times of tension, but also of sharing, as when both villages
participated in secular or religious celebrations. In their narratives, the
interactions prior to the conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s were portrayed as
civil, and their memories seemed more indicative of a complex “vicinitydistance”
or “our village, their village” relationship, than of a widespread
tension separating “different peoples”.
Even the fact that Croats married Serbs and Croats married Bosnians,
and us too, in our context, with the surrounding villages which were Serb
Orthodox, we were on excellent terms. I remember when we had the mill,
my father’s customers, when they came from far away, because it was
slow, it was water-powered, but there weren’t very many mills, and anyway
they all ground that way, so they would come for a couple of days
with 200 or 300 kilos of grain to be ground, so my father sent this customer,
who could be a Serb or a Muslim into the town because there he
could find a place to sleep properly and eat and feed the animals, “and
when it’s ready I’ll give you a shout in a couple of days, you can come
and get loaded and away”. This was the kind of human relationship there
was… [Pask Ballabani]
The narratives of young people should be interpreted within a different
context. It should be remembered first, that the generation of those born
between the second half of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, who
grew up through their childhood, adolescence and early adulthood in the
1980s, still has memories of a life shared with the “others”. More importantly,
many remember schools where all children were united, if not in the
same classes, at least in the schoolyard, through shared interests, tastes and
the consumer patterns of children of the 1990s. Young people of the generation
after that one have practically no memory of peaceful interactions
with neighbours from other groups. These interviewees were often unable
to mention a real, face-to-face encounter with someone of their own age
but of a different language, religion, culture or national identity.
In a pluralistic society in which the mechanisms of segregation operate,
the minority group is more likely to conform to the culture of the majority,
and not the other way around. In other words, it is the minority members
who will be forced to live in two cultures, on two levels of relation-
162