Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
ships: on one level, they share the culture of their own kind, but they are
also made to adopt an “official culture” in the presence of the “others”.
This interaction, first observed in studies of African-Americans in the
United States (Cross, 1990), suggests that most minority groups carry a
dual identity: their own, and the identity developed in interactions with the
dominant group.
In the case of Kosovo, the rule of population ratios has been reversed.
Kosovar Albanians, though the “minority group” in Serbia, outnumber the
other Kosovars. Despite this, the social and political organization of
Kosovo is such that the relationship between the two groups still follows
the same model of subordination/domination, with the Albanians as the
“minority”. As in the original model, adults of both groups have maintained
necessary relationships, especially in administrative quarters, security
facilities and other places of work. On the other hand, in “non-official”
settings, civilians have separated along community lines, and create perceptions
of the other, which should be further investigated. 7 While interactions
based on friendship and neighbourliness therefore weakened and
worsened, other “official” interactions have flourished. The regional economy,
in the wake of increasing social segregation, had split into at least
two parts, leaving, on one side, a survivalist system upheld by the mass
emigration of Albanians and Romany and, on the other, an economic system
protected artificially by the government in Belgrade.
The stories of Kosovar Albanian subjects who were children in the 1990s,
especially those who grew up in the countryside, hardly ever contain
encounters with the Serbs, not even in the chance meetings of everyday
life. If Serbs appear in their narratives, it is as stories of the “other” told by
adults as a kind of supplementary education. With the mass exodus and
expulsion of Albanians from the schools in the late 1980s to the early
1990s, the last opportunity for contact between younger people of different
groups was lost.
In towns, however, interviewees now in their thirties remembered a time
when people of all groups congregated in cafés and public meeting places,
coming together during festive occasions and even, albeit rarely, uniting in
“mixed” marriages. A progressive and inexorable deterioration in these
personal relationships gradually became evident in the narratives, following
the separation of people in their daily routines. Indeed, such a separation
always serves as the first step in relationships based on an incomplete
vision of the “other”, which can then easily lead to widespread myth and
prejudice. Symptoms of this might be found in the subjects’ imprecise
knowledge of facts and political events attributed to the other side. Some
Kosovar Albanian students or former students, for instance, complained of
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