You may download the report HERE
Dear friends,
You have before you the 22nd annual report on the activities of the Centre for Nonviolent Action. In this report, we aimed to present our activities in the briefest form possible and if reading about them makes you want to know more, we invite you to visit our website nenasilje.org where you can find more detailed reports and photo galleries in BCMS and English.
As part of dealing with the past, we recognise memory work as a key factor of peacebuilding. This is why in the past year we have focused many of our activities on encouraging public dialogue and changing the currently dominant forms of the culture of memory – a mixed group of war veterans attended commemorations in Mrkonjić Grad, Stupni Do, Aleksinac, Ahmići and Grabovica, the veterans visited Niš and Jajce, their basic value being the expression of respect towards all victims, whatever
their origin; the “War of Memories” exhibition was displayed in Zavidovići, Podgorica, Goražde and Jajce; unmarked sites of suffering were marked in Vitez, Bosanski Petrovac, Drvar, Kotor Varoš, Mostar, Konjic, Sarajevo and Istočno Sarajevo…
In our struggle against injustice and to overcome the legacy of past injustices, we remain committed to our belief in the strength and integrity of the principle of nonviolence. This past year we organised three peacebuilding trainings – in Mostar (BiH) a training for students from BiH, the Mir-Paqe-Мир training in Kruševo (NMK) for participants from Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia, and regional basic training in peacebuilding held in Ulcinj (MNE). To the corpus of knowledge needed for peacebuilding education we have added a new handbook: “Nonviolence! Peacebuilding Training Handbook”. In it we gathered experience gained over 20 years of working on trainings and the new handbook is also an expanded and revised edition of our handbook “Nonviolence?!” published 18 years ago.
This year, we published the third Biber Short Story Contest in all the languages of the region and with a somewhat expanded topic, and we received a record number of stories, 464 in all. We believe this surge in stories entered for the contest was helped by promotions of the short story collection from the previous contest held in Južna Mitrovica and Podgorica. The Peacebuilding Strategy that we have been working on for years and then did everything in our power to make sure it reached Serbia’s state authorities, including the president and the prime minister, we ultimately decided to publicly present and gift to the citizens of Serbia, for inspiration and further development. It is our hope that we will see a time when we will have collocutors on the other side
committed to genuinely work on building a lasting peace in all its social aspects.
Everything of value takes time to build, and this would seem to apply not just to regional but also to international cooperation. We participated in marking International White Armband Day in Prijedor, at the international conference “The Present of the Past, the Urgency of the Present” in Buenos Aires (a continuation of the cooperation established during the first round of the Mandela Dialogues on memory work held in 2013/2014), and the panel discussion on memory and reconciliation in Ulm.
And last but not least, this year we were happy to welcome to the CNA team an old-new member, Radomir Radević. For those who have not met him yet, we recommend you read his text on what was crucial to his decision to move from Podgorica to Belgrade. And if you would like to know more about what motivates all of us to persevere in our efforts to build a lasting peace in the region of the former Yugoslavia, there is no better place to look than the reports of our activists about the current situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia at the end of this year’s overview.
As always, your feedback will be much appreciated.