In Pakrac, on 1 March 2016, a commemoration was organised “Marking the 25th Anniversary of the Start of the Homeland War in the Republic of Croatia”. Through our friends and associates in peacebuilding from the Pakrac-Lipik Association of Croatian Officers, the Centre for Nonviolent Action (CNA) received an invitation to attend this event. We accepted the invitation and together with Adnan Hasanbegović and Amer Delić from CNA, we also had with us our long-term associate and war veteran from the Croatian Army, Zvonko Lucić.
The programme of the event included a “Victory Parade” through the streets of the town to the Roman Catholic cemetery where the commemoration that we joined was held. We also attended the assembly in front of the Pakrac police station, which is a symbol of the start of armed conflict in Croatia, where the crowd was addressed by political representatives, representatives of the army and veterans associations and participants from the war. The event programme concluded with a lunch organised at the Croatian Centre „Dr. Franjo Tuđman”. Thanks to our hosts, while participating in the programme, we had the opportunity to meet and talk with representatives of local authorities in Pakrac and leaders of the veterans associations.
During our stay in Pakrac, we also held a meeting attended by the president of HVIDR of the Požega-Slavonia County and representatives of the Coordination of Homeland War Associations in Pakrac and Lipik. At the meeting, we presented CNA’s experience of working with war-veterans on constructive dealing with the past and discussed our visits to sites of suffering and official commemorations that we organise together with a group of war veterans from the region. We also expressed our wish to establish closer cooperation with veterans associations from Croatia, as well as our dilemmas about how to approach the associations and the difficulties we encountered in our efforts to organise visits to places of memory and sites of suffering in Croatia.
Our interlocutors showed interest for the idea of cooperation in peacebuilding among former enemies and stressed the need to improve dialogue between people living in what used to be war-affected areas.
We invited them to join us for one of our future visits and they accepted.
We also discussed the possibility of a joint visit by war-veterans to places of memory and sites of suffering in Pakrac and the surrounding area, which remained an open question and will be subject to further arrangements in the future.
For us it is important to note that this was the first time that we took part in an event of this kind marking an important date from the war history of Croatia. Although we had hoped to organise a meeting of this sort earlier, we believe that our visit to Pakrac at this time and the contacts we made will be of use and a step forward in establishing more intensive dialogue about the painful past and building peace in the region.