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 />
computation of Serbian casualties presented in media and academic discussion.<br />
The past was being evoked in order to strengthen the unity of<br />
pan-Serbian people… (Jambresic Kirin, 1996: 71)<br />
Milan Milosevic provides further insight on this matter, in his description<br />
of the so-called “media wars”, and the role of television in constructing the<br />
space in which history was negotiated and narrated:<br />
In its effort to argue the sense of grievance in the population at large, television<br />
especially exploited World War II. The goal was to plant the idea<br />
that the official history of World War II did not tell the complete story<br />
and that the full extent of Croatian atrocities had been covered up. The<br />
number of Serbs who perished during the war in the Croatian death camp<br />
Jasenovac and from Croatian persecution, was, according to television<br />
media, much greater than had been calculated. The “demystification of<br />
history” had been launched, with television as the main medium. The<br />
campaign was in part a response to Franjo Tudjman’s book Bespuca<br />
[Wilderness], published in 1989, a year before his election as president<br />
of Croatia, in which he alleged that official Communist history had greatly<br />
exaggerated the wartime crimes of the Croatian side. To prove<br />
Tudjman wrong, a bizarre process of systematic unearthing of World War<br />
II Serbian mass graves was undertaken in the summer of 1989 and<br />
throughout 1990 in the glare of the Belgrade television. To establish the<br />
“true” number of the dead, concrete-sealed mass graves in limestone terrain<br />
in the Krajina, and later in Herzegovina, were opened, and the skeletons<br />
displayed and bones counted. After funeral services at the site, the<br />
remains were reburied and the graves resealed, with TV cameras eagerly<br />
recording the event. The ceremonial and official character of these events<br />
slowly awakened the sense that the past might have been far worse than<br />
anyone had imagined…” (Milosevic, 1997: 111-112).<br />
There are many other examples of the past being used to build the nationalistic<br />
agendas which have been especially effective in arousing hatred and<br />
pushing populations into war. The resulting tragic conflicts could persuade<br />
one to take a defiant position from which to propose the “absence of memory”<br />
as a way of countering the manipulations of the past that attempt to<br />
justify violence and “ethnocratic” States. Yet, if the idea of “absence of<br />
memory” can prove to be provocative rhetoric in discourses of political<br />
opposition, we, as researchers working with oral sources, must work with<br />
these subjectivities and the ways in which they arise through different<br />
identifications such as ethnicity, gender, class, race and many others.<br />
Luisa Passerini, through the works of Marc Augé and Jean Bertrand<br />
Pontalis, amongst others, wrote of remembrance that:<br />
196<br />
All our memories are screens, but not in the traditional sense, as traces<br />
for something which they reveal and hide at the same time. What is registered<br />
on the screen is not directly the sign of a piece of memory but a