Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
We could not even go to the hospitals because they just killed you, and
[women] could not even give birth, if it was a boy you never saw him
again, they simply said he was dead. [Merita]
The horror stories of male children being murdered in Serbian hospitals
intensified the simple distrust of Serbian doctors, and this mistrust, coherent
with the growing rigidity in the popular image of conflicting camps,
circulated and echoed other stories, until all “different ones” were considered
a potential threat for oneself and one’s loved ones.
Finally, the adults in their early thirties stressed the slander strategies, the
insults and “conspiracy theories” that the Serbs are said to have implemented
in order to portray the Kosovar Albanians as a people of potential
traitors and criminals, and even, endlessly proceeding in this crescendo of
mythification, as people with inhuman traits, without respect for all that is
most precious to man, such as land, religion, women.
Then the Serbs prepared raids in Serb cemeteries, their own cemeteries,
and threw the tombstones of their own dead to the ground, in order to
make the hate grow against Albanians, so that all might see what
Albanians were like, people who cannot even leave the dead in peace, so
now we have started to put a guard at the cemeteries, and we found Serbs
who broke their own tombstones and entered the cemeteries… [Arben B.]
More than one person’s testimony contained these last themes. Many further
remembered one specific incident: the rape of some women attributed
to a few Kosovar Albanians, and the blame of this event, which was immediately
extended via the mass media, from the single culprit to his “kind”.
With various nuances ranging from the Serbian authority’s refusal to
accept responsibility, to their manipulative use of a crime to vilify the
Albanian people as a whole, this topic also re-emerged many times during
the interviews:
Altin: There was talk, from 1981 to 1989, talk of this, of Kosovar
Albanians that ate children, say, that raped women, Serb
women…
Question: Is that what the people were saying…?
Altin: No, in the mass media, in the newspapers, also what the people
said, that the Serb women couldn’t go out at night and
not even during the day…
Here again, in the reminiscence of some witnesses, there seems to be a certain
continuity between the rebellious actions of nationalist Serbs hostile
to Marshall Tito, and later actions of the 1980s in which the Serbs’ own
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