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Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
the passivity allegedly shown by their Belgrade-Serbian classmates under
the government of Slobodan Milosevic. They accused the Serbs of having
endorsed his regime, if only by their consenting silence.
These factors, combined with the propaganda that strategically promoted
discrimination and division between the groups, brought about an escalation
of (ethnic) identification. Like the escalation identified by Scotto and
Arielli in their analysis of the processes of conflict (Scotto and Arielli,
1999), this new reaction heralded the progressive widening of a gap
between groups, in the very cafés and public places where their members
once interacted. Meanwhile, the “third parties” that could possibly shatter
the “duality mindset” that fed the conflict, were literally concealed. As
social reality was caught in the relentless grip of this mechanism, the individuals
or relationships that did not fit into these scenes of antagonism also
faded from the stories:
Ilir: …I have always been a pacifist, I believe in it, but every so
often I feel as though I’m betraying something important,
something sacred… I couldn’t kill anybody I just couldn’t
do it but now I feel rather bad, I feel that this destiny is following
me through life… all my friends, now I don’t know,
if I go back to Kosovo will my friendship with them be the
same; I don’t know if they’ll accept me or not because they
did something else in the war and I didn’t, you know it
wasn’t just me: others too decided to leave and not fight.
Question: Do you feel a bit like a traitor, as you say, or has your choice
been made to weigh heavily on you [by others]?
Ilir: No, just me. I feel like a traitor; nobody has said anything so
far. I don’t think that war is sacred, it’s bad for everybody,
but in cases like these... but something had to be done.
This escalation of tension that begins in perceptions and separations can
then, regrettably, acquire characteristics with very real consequences: it
can lead to crime, it can bend minds to the service of inhumane orders and
make individuals guilty of acts of which they would never have deemed
themselves capable. The path to the extreme violence that exploded in
some areas of Kosovo in 1998 spread further in the months that followed,
and reached its peak in the spring and summer of 1999, and was thus paved
with stories; the proliferating news of crimes, plots and tit-for-tat provocations
that lasted throughout the 1990s. Most of these stories were not
verifiable, in both senses of the word first they recounted events told by
unreliable sources (even if there had been people to check their accuracy,
as was not the case in our project, this would have been almost impossible
to do). Second, these stories could not be checked because from a single
type of event sprung many episodes, and from each of these episodes, multiple
versions proliferated. When asked about crimes remembered or wit-
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