20 PIECES OF ENCOURAGEMENT FOR AWAKENING AND CHANGE Peacebuilding in the Region of the Former Yugoslavia 1 TITLE: 20 Pieces of Encouragement for Awakening and Change Peacebuilding in the Region of the Former Yugoslavia ORIGINAL TITLE: 20 poticaja za buenje i promenu o izgradnji mira na prostoru bivše Jugoslavije EDITORS: Helena Rill Tamara Šmidling Ana Bitoljanu PUBLISHER: Centre for Nonviolent Action TRANSLATION: Marija StojanoviÊ PROOFREADING Sanja Kuljanin Rachel Muir DESIGN AND LAY-OUT Ana Humljan ColiÊ PRINT Standard 2 Publishing of this book was financially supported by the Berghof Foundation for Conflict Studies, Berlin © CNA − Centre for Nonviolent Action 2 20 PIECES OF ENCOURAGEMENT FOR AWAKENING AND CHANGE Peacebuilding in the Region of the Former Yugoslavia Edited by Helena Rill Tamara Šmidling Ana Bitoljanu Centre for Nonviolent Action Belgrade−Sarajevo, 2007 3 Contents PREFACE 7 Martina Fischer INTRODUCTION 13 Tamara Šmidling, Helena Rill I NONVIOLENCE 19 Nonviolence − Political Action from the Stance of Harmlessness, Ana Raffai II ACTIVISM(S) 43 Making Waves or − How to Turn a Mire into a Place where Something Is Happening? Slobodanka DekiÊ 50 Refl ections on Activism, Svetlana KijevËanin 64 Nationalism Entails Discrimination, Ksenija Forca and Majda PuaËa 75 One Should Use These Unexpected Chances, Vesna TerπeliË III PEACE EDUCATION 95 Peace Education − a Book or a Webpage? Iva ZenzeroviÊ ©loser 110 Peace Education as an Initiator of Social Change, Ivana FranoviÊ IV DEALING WITH THE PAST 127 Is Dealing with the Past Slow and Diffi cult in Our Regions? Goran BoæiËeviÊ 137 Without Dealing with the Past, All of It Is on Some Sort of an Abstract Level, Refi k HodæiÊ 147 One Injustice Cannot Be Made Right by Causing a New One, Nenad VukosavljeviÊ 4 V WORK WITH PARTICIPANTS OF THE WAR 165 Veterans in Peacebuilding, Vladan Beara and Predrag MiljanoviÊ VI TOWARDS RECONCILIATION 181 Trauma and Reconciliation, Amela Puljek-Shank 205 We Have Done It from the Depths of Our Heart and Soul, Branka Rajner VII CIVIL QUESTIONS 215 Civil Society or Ubleha? Paul Stubbs 229 From Visibility of Non-governmental Organisations towards the Visibility of Peace Work, Tamara ©midling 241 Ethics and Peace Work − the Unbearable Lightness of Acting, Ana Bitoljanu 251 Like a Soundtrack from a Very Weird Movie, Svetlana LukiÊ VII GENDER AND PEACE WORK 267 Gender Essentialisms, Politicalisation and Peace Activism in the Region of the former Yugoslavia, Darija ÆiliÊ 282 Feminist Media Theory and Activism: Different Worlds or Possible Cooperation, Danica MiniÊ IX DEMILITARISATION 311 Challenges of Demilitarisation, Milan ColiÊ Humljan 343 ABOUT THE AUTHORS 5 6 Preface Martina Fischer1 Berlin, April 2007 It has been more than fifteen years now since the state of Yugoslavia has broken apart and a cycle of organised violence, expulsions and atrocities started. Although different areas were affected by different degrees of violence and destruction ¬ Bosnia and Herzegovina for example was exposed to a long and cruel war, which in other countries (like Macedonia) could be stopped in its beginnings ¬ the entire region still suffers from the consequences and has to deal with the legacies of the wars and human rights violations. Societies in the Western Balkans have to cope with numerous traumas, enhance social healing processes, follow through the prosecution of war crimes, establish functioning mechanisms that guarantee the rights of minorities, co-existence of individuals and groups and participation of all citizens in democratic institutions. In the Western donor community there seems to be a general perception that the mission in the Balkans has been accomplished and that international interventions in this area have been a success story. This may be true if one only considers the fact that the region did not suffer a relapse into war in the past five years. But to say that the overall process of peacebuilding has been successfully completed seems to be a bit too simplistic. This book provides a more differentiated view on the remaining challenges. Whereas some countries of the Western Balkans are considered as stable and sufficiently committed to human rights and democratic values to start negotiations on Association Agreements and potential memberships with the * 1 Dr. Martina Fischer is Deputy Director at the Berghof Research Center for Constructive Confl ict Management in Berlin. (editor's note) 7 preface European Union (for instance Croatia and Macedonia), others are still far from this. Some countries still have to cope with very fundamental challenges. In Bosnia, even ten years after the Dayton Peace Accords brought an end to the fighting, the state-building process is still incomplete. Significant parts of the political ‘elites’ and huge parts of the population still have difficulties to identify with Bosnia and Herzegovina as a nation state. The situation in Bosnia is also interlinked with challenges and problems in neighbouring regions, especially Serbia and Kosovo. The future status of Kosovo is still unclear, due to power politics at the regional and international level, that create severe obstacles to the implementation of the plan that was recently presented by the Kosovo contact group (and even if the Ahtisaari Plan were implemented, the future of Kosovo’s minorities would still remain an open question). Macedonia seems to experience a process of relative stability after the implementation of the Ohrid Agreement, but ¬ similar to other Western Balkan countries ¬ its reality continues to be characterised by ‘parallel societies’ living next to each other. Tensions between these parallel societies have a certain potential to increase if they are fuelled by events in neighbouring regions. This is why many peace activists in the region of the former Yugoslavia argue that to characterise the current situation as ‘peace’ would definitely be too optimistic (see, for instance, Ivana FranoviÊ’s contribution). Some would rather call it a kind of ‘cold peace’. Most societies in the Western Balkans are still marked by numerous and intersecting lines of conflict. This has to be mentioned, not in order to foster the widespread international understanding that the Balkans are ‘per se’ a conflictive context (which is a biased and naïve view of history). One should not infer that nothing has changed and no progress has been made. Yet, it does draw attention to the fact that transitions from war to peace need more than a decade, and still a lot of effort is needed to achieve fundamental processes of conflict transformation, individual and collective healing. This is why prerequisites, obstacles and limits of ‘reconciliation’ ¬ issues of dealing with the legacies of the past, dealing with trauma, overcoming nationalism and distrust ¬ are at the core of many contributions in this book. 8 preface Obviously, initiatives for fact-finding and creating a sober assessment of the past are needed on various levels, the state as well as the civil society level. At the same time, facing the past is a painful process both for individuals, groups and institutions. Peace work in post-conflict societies faces a serious dilemma: leaving the past un-addressed will necessarily mean that things are swept under the carpet. Forcing people to deal with the past, on the other hand, is not effective as it will not change attitudes. On the contrary, it might lead to rejection or depression. Talking about the past, present and future has to be balanced in a way which avoids exhausting and alienating people. As practitioners’ experience shows, there are people in the region who want to address the past and are searching for opportunities to ask questions and join in discussions on these topics, even if remembering is a painful process for them. But they seem to form a minority still. In their daily work, practitioners also have to cope with many backlashes and frustration. In particular, it is difficult for them to make their voices heard and to counterbalance the more powerful official discourses. The official discourse usually deals with the past in a context of ‘victimisation’ or fosters myths of heroism and justification of war. Especially if it comes to the question of taking responsibility for the past, state institutions, politicians in parliaments, governments and public administrations are still very reluctant and/or lack the will for taking serious steps. Decision-makers seem to have little interest even in the publication of reliable data. Many of them either strive to avoid any public debate on dealing with the past, or they tend to exploit issues related to the past for fostering group identities which serve their respective power politics. Official discourses are also still beset with nationalist propaganda ¬ often actively supported by the media. On the other hand, some media and media institutes contributed to distribute more reliable facts than official sources usually offer. A problem remains that so-called public media are still basically state-driven (and private media merely following commercial interests are not so much committed to disseminating serious information). This perpetuates a situation where each side presents its own truth, and data 9 preface are merely used in order to prove the special victim status of the respective side rather than to paint an objective picture. In all countries of the former Yugoslavia civil society organisations have set up initiatives for fact-finding, awareness raising for the past and reconciliation. Others are active in peace education and try to address existing conflict lines. Many of them work with a high level of engagement, but most of their activities are not in the spotlight of the media. A problem that all civil society initiatives have in common is the chronic lack of support from media and official politics. Nevertheless, some practitioners are convinced that ‘a tenacious and committed political struggle’ will lead to a decrease of nationalism in the region and that the struggle for social change has to continue (see the contribution of Ksenija Forca and Majda PuaËa in this book).