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 passivity allegedly shown by their Belgrade-Serbian classmates under<br />
the government of Slobodan Milosevic. They accused the Serbs of having<br />
endorsed his regime, if only by their consenting silence.<br />
These factors, combined with the propaganda that strategically promoted<br />
discrimination and division between the groups, brought about an escalation<br />
of (ethnic) identification. Like the escalation identified by Scotto and<br />
Arielli in their analysis of the processes of conflict (Scotto and Arielli,<br />
1999), this new reaction heralded the progressive widening of a gap<br />
between groups, in the very cafés and public places where their members<br />
once interacted. Meanwhile, the “third parties” that could possibly shatter<br />
the “duality mindset” that fed the conflict, were literally concealed. As<br />
social reality was caught in the relentless grip of this mechanism, the individuals<br />
or relationships that did not fit into these scenes of antagonism also<br />
faded from the stories:<br />
Ilir: …I have always been a pacifist, I believe in it, but every so<br />
often I feel as though I’m betraying something important,<br />
something sacred… I couldn’t kill anybody I just couldn’t<br />
do it but now I feel rather bad, I feel that this destiny is following<br />
me through life… all my friends, now I don’t know,<br />
if I go back to Kosovo will my friendship with them be the<br />
same; I don’t know if they’ll accept me or not because they<br />
did something else in the war and I didn’t, you know it<br />
wasn’t just me: others too decided to leave and not fight.<br />
Question: Do you feel a bit like a traitor, as you say, or has your choice<br />
been made to weigh heavily on you [by others]?<br />
Ilir: No, just me. I feel like a traitor; nobody has said anything so<br />
far. I don’t think that war is sacred, it’s bad for everybody,<br />
but in cases like these... but something had to be done.<br />
This escalation of tension that begins in perceptions and separations can<br />
then, regrettably, acquire characteristics with very real consequences: it<br />
can lead to crime, it can bend minds to the service of inhumane orders and<br />
make individuals guilty of acts of which they would never have deemed<br />
themselves capable. The path to the extreme violence that exploded in<br />
some areas of Kosovo in 1998 spread further in the months that followed,<br />
and reached its peak in the spring and summer of 1999, and was thus paved<br />
with stories; the proliferating news of crimes, plots and tit-for-tat provocations<br />
that lasted throughout the 1990s. Most of these stories were not<br />
verifiable, in both senses of the word first they recounted events told by<br />
unreliable sources (even if there had been people to check their accuracy,<br />
as was not the case in our project, this would have been almost impossible<br />
to do). Second, these stories could not be checked because from a single<br />
type of event sprung many episodes, and from each of these episodes, multiple<br />
versions proliferated. When asked about crimes remembered or wit-<br />
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