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Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
survival of defeat. The relics of Prince Lazar, killed in the battle, had
been carried a month previously, in a procession accompanied by
unprecedented media pomp, through virtually all Serb-populated regions
where war would later break out (Milosevic, 1997: 110).
According to Milan Milosevic’s reconstruction, it was in Gazimestan that
Slobodan Milosevic first explicitly mentioned the possibility of war, in his
mind, then, in Kosovo itself (even though, as is well known, the wars in
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina erupted before the Kosovo conflict). In
his speech, Slobodan Milosevic addressed the Serbs as victims living in
the heart of their own ancestral land, harassed by the Albanians who were
taking advantage of their autonomy and would try, sooner or later, to unite
Kosovo with Albania (Milosevic, 1997).
This episode clearly demonstrates how the past was used to reinforce a
collective national identity which, in the last decades, had to face the
growing power of an antagonistic population identified as the Albanians.
One of the results of this process was to depict the Serbs living in Kosovo
as victims of Albanian nationalism. This strategy of “victimization” is
common to many nationalistic discourses born in the former Yugoslavia.
The Croatians, for instance, depicted themselves as victims of the Serbs
and of the official memory of the socialist regimes. Renata Jambresic
Kirin, in her study of the oral testimonies of Croatian refugees, emphasized
the dynamics of this victimization process, which is powerful
enough to legitimate the fabrication of new national identity after a conflict.
Kirin has examined the case of Croatia, showing how the dominant
discourse was woven around the discourse of sacrifice and the discourse
of renewal, which played an important role in political negotiations and
decisions. The life stories of displaced persons, however, told of women
and men:
Whose fate – in terms of the dominant ideology – symbolized the
grandeur of Croatian victims in a patriotic war [including families of the
killed and wounded soldiers] who would face, in their harsh everyday
reality, all the misfortunes of a jeopardized social group living in the
strange surroundings of big cities, isolated hotels on the coast, or living
on the unsafe frontier, not very far from their inaccessible homes which
are still in the occupied territories. After the first enchantment, disappointment
is largely shared among displaced persons who have recently
returned to their devastated homes and settled in temporary settlements
with no foundations for fast reconstruction” (Jambresic Kirin, 1996: 66).
The common use of the idea of “victim” is a complex topic that warrants
further investigation. In these pages I would like to stress the tension, as
described in Jambresic Kirin’s work, between the individuals’ narrations
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