Coming to the Centre for Nonviolent Action Sarajevo-Belgrade means a lot more to me than just a job. For me, this meant having to move from Zagreb, a place I knew very well, to Sarajevo, a place I had not gotten to know before. Still, some events connected me to Sarajevo, this was the city where I found out I was accepted as a student of history at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. In hindsight, I feel like these two things are connected.
I don’t have my own memories of the war, I was born a few years after the wars of the 1990s ended, I belong to the generation of the new century that often forgets how ubiquitous the consequences of war are in our society. Through stark divisions between communities, hate speech, glorification of wartime victories, political manipulation of others’ losses to win votes and in many other ways. Still, my family, like many others, has had its share of wartime experience and trauma. I can’t say there was silence about that period, but it was reduced to anecdotes suitable for all ages.
The motif that I inherited indirectly was fear.
Running into the Past
My grandmother has always kept towels in a cupboard that’s part of the shelf with the TV. The towels were always ironed because washing them, even at ninety degrees, was not sufficient to ensure they were perfectly clean. Between the ironed, clean towels grandma also kept her fear. It was written down in a diary she had kept in the 1990s, during the periods when my dad was off to war. Or at least that’s how she explained it to me, when I discovered her diary in that cupboard while playing as a little girl. I don’t remember how old I was exactly, but I do know I could read, which is not to say that I could understand what was written in it. Later on, grandma told me she had thrown out the diary. We are now both sorry about this and have talked a lot more about it since, which is why I know so much about her fear of war, a fear that is about a lot more than that.
When I started studying history at university, I stayed away from the wars of the 1990s, always seeing it as a controversial period that is difficult to deal with if you want to express respect to all those who were killed. Still, I wanted to know how societies can end up in a situation of divisions that lead to the marginalisation, or eradication of certain groups on the grounds of religious, racial or ethnic belonging. In the context of human rights, and given that it is the foundation of international law, I started reading more about the Holocaust and the mechanisms that preceded it. I liked the sentiment of “never again” as part of a culture of memory where we learn from mass tragedies in order to make sure they are never repeated, but I could not get it in that framework. I finally understood that I could not run away from the historical context in which I was born.
Equally for All
2024 was the key year for my activation, when during an internship at the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Croatia, I engaged more deeply with the topic of wars in our region. This led me to a crucial experience – CNA’s Basic Training in Peacebuilding, where I learned to listen to and understand others. I came to understand how my opinions and experiences coexist with many others that are equally valuable. This unforgettable experience extended into 2025 when I took part in the Training of Trainers in Peacebuilding where with diverse people and the CNA Team, I learned what this can mean in practice.
During that training, we visited many sites of suffering, including sites of memory where war crimes were committed on 16 April 1993 in Trusina, where the victims were Croat, and in Ahmići, where the victims were Bosniak. I had been familiar with the facts surrounding these events, but once again I felt fear, a fear that was not mine, it belonged to those who had lost their lives at these sites. This was particularly true in Ahmići where the atmosphere of remembering the loss of life had a very strong impact on me. I am aware of the negative approach by some media, politicians and the general narrative about that crime in Croatia, but I have a sense that the emotions that overwhelmed me at that moment came from humanity, and not from collective guilt. As such, they are similar to the emotions I feel towards the fear of my grandmother, my family, because war, and the fear it generates, is the same for everyone.
Reflection during that process had me grappling with the question of my legitimacy as someone who does not have first-hand experience of war, and I had often wondered what gave me the right to act.
Is legitimacy needed at all to understand that all people feel the same, which means that every loss is equally painful, and therefore that all victims are equally valuable. I am glad I do not remember the war myself because the desire to remain free of such memories, just like the other young people born after the 1990s, means that I want to build a society that will not repeat the armed conflicts of the region. So, my path to CNA is paved with the desire to engage in peace work and transfer the values that I stand behind fully, with empathy for all victims, as I come full circle in Sarajevo.