You may download the report here.
Dear friends,
We present to you the 21st annual report of the Centre for Nonviolent Action. We used to joke that our mission was to make ourselves redundant, looking forward to a time when the Balkans would no longer have need for our work. We still hope for this, but it’s not a joking matter anymore. Regional political circumstances, whose deterioration we have recorded from year to year on these pages, are currently threatening to spin out of control. As if domestic warlords playing with matches in the hayloft were not enough, there is now open talk of options to “swap territories or populations” in the dispute between Serbia and Kosovo, so that the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina can no longer sleep soundly, knowing as they do how contagious and tempting such concepts are for the masters of other people’s fates. In a situation where there are more and more people who believe the best prevention is to remember how our neighbours deceived us in 1991 and 1992 and 1999, so it’s safer not to trust them at all, in a situation when it is far easier to find enemies than allies, peace must be a conscious choice, systematically developed with all means at our disposal. You are sure to find allies in that process from across the border, as we have seen countless times in our work, this past year being no exception.
Misusing the past in the post-Yugoslav region has become so commonplace that it threatens to become the new truth. This is not a new trend and we have been making efforts to stand up to it for some time, which is why this year, again, we organised two events to coordinate forces in counteracting this widespread misuse of the past. In October 2017, we organised the second Dialogue Circle with historians aimed at linking historians and activists to produce constructive criticism of this misuse and examine the potential role for peacebuilding from an activist standpoint. In addition to regional historians, reporters and activists, we were also joined by historians from Austria, and then we managed to considerably expand the circle a few months later. Namely, in May 2018, we organised the international conference on “Reconciling Histories!?”, which brought together peace and human rights activists, peace work researchers, reporters and historians from various countries with war and postwar experience, ranging from India and Sri Lanka, the Balkan countries, Ukraine, Abkhazia, Georgia, all the way to Western Europe. The conference dealt with various experiences in the postwar process, the role of historical myths and narratives for reconciliation, and understanding the importance of nonviolence.
That black-and-white views of history—recognising only the just and the guilty and seeing justice in righteous anger—can lead to negating the suffering of a whole group of people is something we bring to light with the exhibition “On the Trail of the Danube Swabians”. This was a way to present a multiyear research study, prepared by our colleagues Helena Rill and Marijana Stojčić, on the memories and narratives of almost half a million people who until the start of the Second World War lived in the territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but today almost no traces of them are left. Experience that remains unprocessed and unarticulated has a tendency to be repeated, as we were able to see through the recent wars of the 1990s, and these experiences show us that a change in narrative becomes possible only when suffering is recognised on the “enemy” side.
That this is a difficult lesson to learn was demonstrated by this year’s cancellation of the “War of Memories” exhibition that was supposed to be put on display in Sisak in November. The exhibition aims to raise awareness about the current models of collective memory and memorialisation and call for new solutions whose primary focus will be the victims of injustice and violence, whatever their origin. The already agreed hosting of the exhibition was cancelled because, as they told us, it was “not the right time”. Fortunately, this opinion was not shared in Skopje, Novi Pazar or Kragujevac, where we had the opportunity to show the exhibition to the public.
That it is proactive and beneficial to reflect on not just what happened to us, but how we will build a future, a society we would want to live in, is something we learn in each cycle of the Biber Short Story Competition, which was again devoted to the topic of reconciliation. While preparing the third cycle, with a slightly different topic, in March 2018, we published the collection from the last competition, Biber02. The collection contains 25 short stories selected by the jury out of the 385 stories that entered the competition. This year, we presented the collection in Tetovo and Zagreb, and we will be hosting a promotion in Mitrovica soon.
We have continued our efforts for the adoption of the Peacebuilding Strategy in Serbia and we hope this initiative will encourage, if not the governments of the countries in the region, then at least constructive dialogue about how sustainable peace can and should look and which institutional mechanisms can contribute to it.
We held two trainings: Mir-Paqe-Мир, for participants from Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia, and Peacebuilding Training for War-Veterans. This a group for which it is safe to say they don’t want to wait a thousand years to start understanding what happened to us, as they have shown through their peace activities, which are also detailed in these pages. No less hard-working and dedicated to peacebuilding, our little “guerrilla” group of peace activists marked unmarked sites of atrocities in Goražde, Stolac, Mostar, Vareš, Kakanj, Jajce, Prijedor and Kneževo.
Meanwhile, a few days ago, the New York Times published an opinion piece by a former staff member of the Obama administration who insists that the proposed land swap between Kosovo and Serbia must be supported. In his opinion, this “peaceful form of ethnic cleansing”, as he calls it, is the only solution for peace in the region and represents what the people themselves want. You can read about whether there is any truth to this and about what it feels like to live in Kosovo, in Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the reports of activists included at the end of this annual report.
In this report, we present an overview of all our activities from September 2017 to September 2018, but please note that detailed reports, photo galleries and videos are available on our website http://nenasilje.org.
We invite you to read what we have prepared and, as always, we look forward to your feedback, criticism and support.
CNA Team