Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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<strong>Psychosocial</strong> <strong>Notebook</strong>, Volume 2, October 2001<br />
vulnerability and of induced self-rejection. “Ethnic cleansing” is quite a<br />
recent definition, meant to indicate hate crimes based upon ethnicity. The<br />
category may include different levels of threat, deportation, imprisonment<br />
of those resisting and killing, especially of the male members of a group.<br />
When survivors of such “ethnic cleansing” tell of the escalation of a conflict,<br />
they tell of their body, progressively becoming an object that must be<br />
hidden. Since the body is, above all, a social construct, the war creates a<br />
climate that allows for a process of recognition where this body is perceived<br />
as dangerous. Your body and the way you look, your clothes and<br />
the way you move, and many other non-verbal elements related to the<br />
body identify who you are, in terms of gender, ethnicity, class, in terms of<br />
sexual, religious and political preferences, in terms of equal or enemy. The<br />
following answers are discussed regardless of the ethnic belonging of the<br />
interviewees. My purpose, in this paper, is not to assess who suffered to a<br />
greater extent. Rather, my goal is to indicate the common denominators<br />
across ethnic and social boundaries.<br />
During the ethnic cleansing enacted in Kosovo, men faced a higher risk of<br />
death than women, the elderly and children: “For the males there was no<br />
pity” [Gezim]. Even during their escape from the region, men had to take<br />
different and longer routes to reach a safe place where they could reunite<br />
with their families. Both young males and unmarried women had to<br />
employ various strategies of mimesis and passing, as in this mother’s<br />
memories (Larsen 1997):<br />
They piled us up there, the Serbian started to separate men and women…<br />
we camouflaged my youngest son as a woman, so they didn’t detain him.<br />
[Alketa]<br />
My daughter made up a bundle with a piece of wood inside [which<br />
looked like a newborn baby], to pass as a married woman and avoid [the<br />
risk] of being taken by the soldiers. [Alketa]<br />
In the narrations of these interviewees, the body becomes an object of<br />
restraint. The interviewees referred specifically to space-time restrictions,<br />
which, in some cases further included physical punishment for those who<br />
did not respect such limitations. Being beaten in public, for instance, was<br />
considered a humiliation by a male head of the family: “it is better to be<br />
arrested, rather than to be beaten in the middle of the road”, in front of<br />
family and friends.<br />
Through the interviewees’ accounts, I have identified four different phases<br />
of restraint that preceded forced exodus. The first is characterized by a set<br />
of restrictions both upon job-related commuting from one city to another,<br />
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