Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
In the case of Kosovo, the recurrent pattern that Bruck so well described,
writing that “The human community needs to be split into perpetrators or
transgressors, objects or victims, and authorities and responsible” (Bruck,
1992), was mixed, within every type of organized intervention, with the
“humanitarian” aim of the different agencies and NGOs.
The media exposure/transformation of wartime events that was so particular
to the Kosovo crisis also allowed the journalists to meddle with the
diverse versions of this basic conflict plot. The media’s tendency to break
up the facts and then put them back together to produce a telling story,
found its best description in the term “mythinformation”, 2 a word which
evokes the means by which stories can be tied to objects, intentions and
events in a strong blend that appears true and credible because it is familiar,
and it is familiar because it includes the fundamental trilogy: predator/victim/rescuer.
Our intervention did not arrive within a neutral situation,
but rather in one where “mythinformation” had effectively fossilized
the environment, interpreting it through the plot: aggressor/victim/rescuer
mentioned above.
The PTR project, through the Archives of Memory, tried to offer the different
players involved in the Kosovo intervention a series of possible
stimuli to help them break away from this rigid and limiting constellation.
In this brief introduction, I would particularly like to concentrate on the
possibility that one of the constellation’s components, the “Rescuer”,
might break away from its rigid role. To be able to break away from this
set function, he or she who plays the part must be aware that the “Rescuer”
model can be hidden or masked under a multitude of figures. I have briefly
attempted to describe these coverings, beginning with the guise pointed
out by Enriquez, the figure of the “Trainer”. It is only by breaking away
from his rigid role of “Rescuer”, that the humanitarian worker can offer
other members of the constellation (such as the “Victim”) solutions that
are not repetitive and fatal, insofar as they reproduce the same dynamics
of violence that created the initial conflict. In other words, it is by breaking
away from the set figures that the rescuer/trainer might help construct
a future less exposed to the systematic repetition of violence.
Every act of international cooperation, especially if it occurs in the context
of humanitarian intervention in a transition situation immediately following
a conflict, and even more so in the field of psychosocial support,
implies both a series of explicit models, and “ghost motors” 3 that confer
upon those who carry out this work its simultaneously passionate, worrisome
and frustrating aspects. The work’s attraction probably resides in
contemplating and sharing the desire of omnipotence with the fear of
impotence, in being (at least in intention) a bearer of life, but also a
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