Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
vulnerability and of induced self-rejection. “Ethnic cleansing” is quite a
recent definition, meant to indicate hate crimes based upon ethnicity. The
category may include different levels of threat, deportation, imprisonment
of those resisting and killing, especially of the male members of a group.
When survivors of such “ethnic cleansing” tell of the escalation of a conflict,
they tell of their body, progressively becoming an object that must be
hidden. Since the body is, above all, a social construct, the war creates a
climate that allows for a process of recognition where this body is perceived
as dangerous. Your body and the way you look, your clothes and
the way you move, and many other non-verbal elements related to the
body identify who you are, in terms of gender, ethnicity, class, in terms of
sexual, religious and political preferences, in terms of equal or enemy. The
following answers are discussed regardless of the ethnic belonging of the
interviewees. My purpose, in this paper, is not to assess who suffered to a
greater extent. Rather, my goal is to indicate the common denominators
across ethnic and social boundaries.
During the ethnic cleansing enacted in Kosovo, men faced a higher risk of
death than women, the elderly and children: “For the males there was no
pity” [Gezim]. Even during their escape from the region, men had to take
different and longer routes to reach a safe place where they could reunite
with their families. Both young males and unmarried women had to
employ various strategies of mimesis and passing, as in this mother’s
memories (Larsen 1997):
They piled us up there, the Serbian started to separate men and women…
we camouflaged my youngest son as a woman, so they didn’t detain him.
[Alketa]
My daughter made up a bundle with a piece of wood inside [which
looked like a newborn baby], to pass as a married woman and avoid [the
risk] of being taken by the soldiers. [Alketa]
In the narrations of these interviewees, the body becomes an object of
restraint. The interviewees referred specifically to space-time restrictions,
which, in some cases further included physical punishment for those who
did not respect such limitations. Being beaten in public, for instance, was
considered a humiliation by a male head of the family: “it is better to be
arrested, rather than to be beaten in the middle of the road”, in front of
family and friends.
Through the interviewees’ accounts, I have identified four different phases
of restraint that preceded forced exodus. The first is characterized by a set
of restrictions both upon job-related commuting from one city to another,
173