Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
as both interviewers and interviewees in order to encourage critical reflection
on the existence of different definitions and conditions of youth
within Serbia and of different and competing experiences of ethnic affiliation
across Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). All of
the interviewers were Serbian, most of them 22 to 25 years old. They were
asked to interview Serbs from Kosovo along with other interviewers of
varying age and gender groups. This provided them the opportunity to
question the homogeneity of Serbian identity by confronting experiences
and realities different from those available to them in Serbia proper. I consider
having provided them this occasion of reflection as one of the main
achievements of the project.
A description of the condition of the Kosovar Serbian
displaced in the FRY:
from official reports to lived experiences
During the time I spent in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, I became
acquainted with many Serbian Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from
Kosovo, in many different circumstances. I met some while I was supervising
the various interviews, others as interviewees, and still others at the
headquarters of local Non Governmental Organizations and community
centres that were found suitable for the purposes of the project. From the
different experiences they shared with me, I was given the impression that
the Kosovar-Serbs exiled in the FRY found themselves in an extremely
difficult position for many different reasons.
The first of these was a consequence of the timing of their exodus: they
had arrived in Serbia in the wake of two prior waves of refugee migrations,
(Bosnian and Croatian Serbs) and were received in an economic context
characterized by extreme poverty and hardship. Worse yet, however, was
the fact that they came from a very different experience of “Serbhood”,
one that others had come to blame for supporting the political elite in a
regime that most of the people living in rump FRY had by then come to
despise. On one hand, Kosovar Serbs forced to leave their homes and villages
to escape retaliatory violence were living proof of the failure of the
regime’s nationalist militarism in Kosovo, while on the other hand, the
Serbs of Serbia were ambivalent towards them, both because they had supported
the hated regime throughout the years, and because they had eventually
“surrendered” under pressure from the Albanians. Moreover, since
Serbia’s economic situation had consistently deteriorated in the previous
years, (the average salary being around 80 DEM when the interviews took
place), and because of the fact that Kosovo has long been seen as an under-
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