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 />
survival of defeat. The relics of Prince Lazar, killed in the battle, had<br />
been carried a month previously, in a procession accompanied by<br />
unprecedented media pomp, through virtually all Serb-populated regions<br />
where war would later break out (Milosevic, 1997: 110).<br />
According to Milan Milosevic’s reconstruction, it was in Gazimestan that<br />
Slobodan Milosevic first explicitly mentioned the possibility of war, in his<br />
mind, then, in Kosovo itself (even though, as is well known, the wars in<br />
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina erupted before the Kosovo conflict). In<br />
his speech, Slobodan Milosevic addressed the Serbs as victims living in<br />
the heart of their own ancestral land, harassed by the Albanians who were<br />
taking advantage of their autonomy and would try, sooner or later, to unite<br />
Kosovo with Albania (Milosevic, 1997).<br />
This episode clearly demonstrates how the past was used to reinforce a<br />
collective national identity which, in the last decades, had to face the<br />
growing power of an antagonistic population identified as the Albanians.<br />
One of the results of this process was to depict the Serbs living in Kosovo<br />
as victims of Albanian nationalism. This strategy of “victimization” is<br />
common to many nationalistic discourses born in the former Yugoslavia.<br />
The Croatians, for instance, depicted themselves as victims of the Serbs<br />
and of the official memory of the socialist regimes. Renata Jambresic<br />
Kirin, in her study of the oral testimonies of Croatian refugees, emphasized<br />
the dynamics of this victimization process, which is powerful<br />
enough to legitimate the fabrication of new national identity after a conflict.<br />
Kirin has examined the case of Croatia, showing how the dominant<br />
discourse was woven around the discourse of sacrifice and the discourse<br />
of renewal, which played an important role in political negotiations and<br />
decisions. The life stories of displaced persons, however, told of women<br />
and men:<br />
Whose fate – in terms of the dominant ideology – symbolized the<br />
grandeur of Croatian victims in a patriotic war [including families of the<br />
killed and wounded soldiers] who would face, in their harsh everyday<br />
reality, all the misfortunes of a jeopardized social group living in the<br />
strange surroundings of big cities, isolated hotels on the coast, or living<br />
on the unsafe frontier, not very far from their inaccessible homes which<br />
are still in the occupied territories. After the first enchantment, disappointment<br />
is largely shared among displaced persons who have recently<br />
returned to their devastated homes and settled in temporary settlements<br />
with no foundations for fast reconstruction” (Jambresic Kirin, 1996: 66).<br />
The common use of the idea of “victim” is a complex topic that warrants<br />
further investigation. In these pages I would like to stress the tension, as<br />
described in Jambresic Kirin’s work, between the individuals’ narrations<br />
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