You may download the report HERE
Dear friends,
You have before you the 23rd annual report of the Centre for Nonviolent Action.
This year, our annual report differs from previous ones inasmuch as 2020 differs from previous years. The pandemic that enveloped the whole world this year has significantly impacted our work and all our planned activities. The disruptions caused by the pandemic affected not just our work, but the state of democracy and human rights in the Western Balkans region as a whole. You can read more about this at the very beginning of our report.
This year, we have had to cancel all our peace education programmes, the Mir-Paqe-Мир training for people from Kosovo, Serbia and North Macedonia, which had been planned for May, and our Basic Training in Peacebuilding, which had been planned for October. The impossibility of travel and the dangers of the epidemic, as well as countries closing their borders to foreign nationals made this part of our work impossible. We organized our last basic training at the end of 2019 and you can read about it in this report.
What was possible to do – in small teams, with smaller groups of participants from just one country – we did: actions to mark unmarked sites of suffering and two promotions of the onms.nenasilje.org website in Sarajevo and Banja Luka, as well as joint visits by war veterans to commemorations and sites of killings. With mixed groups of war veterans, we visited Skelani, Prijepolje (the commemoration to victims abducted from the train in Štrpci), Vitez (at the commemoration for children killed at Osmica), Uborak, Briševo, Zecovi, Korićanske stijene, Mostar and Grabovica.
Also, having realised at the very start of the epidemic that artists would likely be left with nothing to do, and with all of us under lockdown, we decided to launch the fourth Biber Short Story Competition almost a year early, and to publish a selection of stories from previous rounds of the competition in translation into English, in electronic format. These are activities that can be conducted online and do not require the team implementing them or the participants to move around physically. What we did not manage to do this year – we were unable to organise promotions of the Biber 03 Collection, which was published at the end of February, though we had planned at least three – in Šibenik, Prijedor and Prizren.
Our Nonviolence!? handbook has been translated and printed in Macedonian and Albanian. Also, your friends from Peace Action translated and published our Reconciliation handbook in Albanian. After members of our team visited Argentina, we published Whatever it may cost me, I want a better country for my children, a publication about memory of the crimes of the junta in Argentina. There is also our article on our work to mark unmarked sites of suffering, “Misery is all there is”, which was also published in electronic format.
We sincerely hope that the time ahead will allow us to return to our usual activities of bringing people together, facilitating exchanges, helping them get to know each other, providing support and sharing ideas, thoughts, fears and wishes.
This report contains summaries of our activities, but more detailed information is available on our website nenasilje.org, as well as on onms.nenasilje.org and biber.nenasilje.org.
We welcome your comments, insights and any feedback you can send us.
CNA Team