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