You may download the report here:
Dear friends,
The pandemic has marked yet another year and our work during 2021. We did a lot more and travelled a lot more than last year, but these are still not normal working conditions.
Like last year, most of our activities this year involved working with war veterans and marking unmarked sites of suffering. We attended commemorations in Varivode and Gošić (Croatia), and in Bosnia and Herzegovina: in Boderšite and at the bridge on the Sava (Brčko), in Bradina near Konjic, the commemoration for children killed in Vitez, as well as the commemorations in Uborak, Sutina and Zalik near Mostar.
The team conducting activities to mark unmarked sites of suffering carried out five actions, marking another 33 sites of suffering across Bosnia and Herzegovina. More details about all their actions can be found on their website onms.nenasilje.org.
We managed to organise one of our peace education activities – Training for Students from BiH – during the summer on Mount Vlašić. We did not hold the Mir-Paqe-Мир Training this year, again, becausethe epidemiological situation restricted cross-border travel and gatherings.
We launched a new site, handbook.nenasilje.org, hosting our complete handbook for training in peacebuilding, nonviolent conflict resolution and dealing with the past, making it easily accessible online for everyone working on these topics.
We can finally plan the promotions of the Biber 03 Collection that had previously been hindered by the pandemic. We are also preparing the Biber 04 Collection with stories entered in the competition last year, 2020, and we plan to present this collection and publish the call for the next competition, Biber 05. We have also published Biber 0a, a selection of stories from the first three competitions in English translation. For more news about Biber, follow the website biber.nenasilje.org.
Friends from Conciliation Resources printed our handbook “Reconciliation?!” in Russian.
Our cooperation with the Serb National Council in Croatia is very valuable to us and we hope to expand it in the future. In May, we went on a study visit to their organisation and had important and very emotionalencounters with Serbs living in Croatia.
We also had to deal with a problematic representation of our work and our general approach to reconciliation in the book of sociologist Lea David, The Past Can’t Heal Us. Reconciliation and peacebuilding can always be discussed, but dialogue requires two sides equally interested in establishing dialogue. Since our work was written about without anyone reaching out to us, we had to respond.
In cooperation with our friend Luan Imeri from North Macedonia, members of the CNA team wrote about the contexts in which we work. The pandemic has helped undemocratic regimes in the region further restrict freedoms and democracy.
It was with great sorrow that we said our final goodbyes to our good friend and long-time associate Novica Kostić, and a number of other dear people and friends of the organisation who passed away this year.
We welcome your comments, insights and any feedback you can send us.
More details on all of the above can be found in this report and on our website nenasilje.org.
CNA Team