If you think of a journey in terms of its route, then my path to CNA could probably be reduced to three points: Paraćin – Niš – Belgrade. But that doesn’t explain how I actually found my way to becoming part of the CNA team.

My First Fishbowl

I was born in the final Yugoslavia, when the war was already over. Or at least that’s how the official historical record would have it. The shooting had stopped, but the war hadn’t gone away, instead the criminals had moved onto the television screens. I grew up in a Serbia where they were given more airtime than cartoons, although I was only interested in cartoons at that time. In a way, the criminals never left that space.

My first fishbowl, the place where I was born and grew up, was Paraćin. I remember standing on the balcony of my home, watching a procession of people pass by. The only other times I would see so many people gathered together would be at protests, never again in Paraćin. It was the funeral of my neighbour, one of the two soldiers killed at Topčider in 2004.

Back then, I had no understanding of either how or why their deaths remained unresolved, or of death itself. Today, I know that their deaths were never fully brought to light, and for years there have been rumours that they were killed for seeing something they shouldn’t have, a man the state was hiding, a man because of whom others had already been put to death. In that story, loyalty did not mean protection, it meant silence, even at the cost of others’ lives.

The image has remained with me. My mother spent that whole day weeping. It was my first encounter with death that I can remember. That day I learned what silence looks like. How to stand still. How to wait for the procession to pass.

Paraćin was both my home and the place I wanted to leave.

Patriotism?

Studying in Niš brought a new twist to my life story. It was from Niš that I first set off on a study trip called “The Present of Our Past”, organised by the Centre for Nonviolent Action in 2022. The trip took us across Kozara, Jasenovac, Prijedor, Sanski Most…

It was the first time I encountered a silence that was not only about paying respect, but left something behind. Something that is difficult to name, but you feel its presence in your body as you pass through these places.

While my mother worried about the earthquakes shaking the region in those days, and told me to watch out (I’m still not sure how you’re meant to watch out for earthquakes), I was feeling the ground shifting inside me, something no one had warned me about.

From Niš, I went further south, to the Basic Training in Peacebuilding in Kruševo in the autumn of 2023. And I left with “heavier baggage”.

My journey did not end there. In March 2024, I found myself at former detention sites in Herzegovina. There, I saw what happens when processions stop – not to pay their respects, but to turn their heads, where not every silence is peace.

I don’t always feel comfortable at CNA trainings and events. There is a constant undercurrent of unease, wariness, a feeling that I’m reaching parts of myself that I would rather avoid. Writing this is not pleasant. It forces me to not look away. To not turn my head from the procession.

And while I try not to turn my head, I keep telling myself that I wasn’t even born back then, that I don’t even consider myself much of a Serbian (just a girl from Paraćin), yet I still feel responsibility and sadness – sadness because of what happened and responsibility for what is happening with it now.

I never thought of myself as patriotic, and for years this was my escape route. I associated patriotism with slogans, flags, with a love that cannot tolerate questions. I did not choose the country I was born in – the stork just dropped me there. But it turns out coincidence does not free you from responsibility, or from what you feel is a legacy you want to break.

Still, the things that were happening around me gave me no peace, even when I tried to push them aside. I did not have the privilege of turning a blind eye and I feel somewhat grateful for that.

Earthquake

And then came 1 November 2024 and the collapse of the canopy in Novi Sad. When the students paying their respects in silence were attacked, this set off the faculty blockades, plenums, protests… The country I was from started to resemble something I could love.

The student movement revived my faith in people, but also defined what loving a country means. I realised that genuine love for your homeland is not the nationalist, extended narcissism that only loves its own.

The Training of Trainers (ToT) proceeded in parallel with the student protests. It was difficult, learning about violence and how to deconstruct it, while my thoughts were out on the streets with the people who were fighting to make sure buildings would not fall on our heads, and that people would not be beaten, trampled underfoot or silenced.

I thought about quitting. I felt torn, as if I had left the struggle in the streets to sit at a training.

Then I realised that was not what I had done. I had come to the training at the height of everything precisely because these two things were not separate. Something about what was happening in the streets felt familiar – the notion of trusting institutions, but then having them turn against you. In the war, that’s how the army and police functioned. After the war, it was the courts. And now it was happening all over again in the streets.

CNA was not teaching me something abstract and distant. It was teaching me to recognise what I had always sensed was there.

The third phase of ToT was held in Macedonia in mid-July. Halfway through the training, I had to leave to attend my childhood friend’s wedding. As I was returning alone by car, Google Maps led me to the Miratovac border crossing, which was now defunct. I stopped in front of the barricades and saw that the road led nowhere. I later learned that Agim Agushi, an Albanian man from the nearby village, was killed near that border in 2002 while returning home on a tractor with his cousin. Initially, I had thought of the village as Mirotvorac (Peacemaker). It wasn’t.

The final phase of the training was organised near Sarajevo. During a “war tour” of Sarajevo, I saw the city through two simultaneous timelines, the streets as they are today and the battle lines they used to be, the impact sites where shells had detonated, bridges named after people who were killed on them before having time to take cover.

I walked through Sarajevo looking at buildings scarred by shrapnel. If the buildings have so many scars, who knows how many the people still live with.

I felt unwelcome. I knew it was a defence mechanism – because this was done by members of the community I hail from. Not in my name, but maybe I was part of their motivation. They had come “to defend their future generations” (didn’t that mean me?). The uneasiness is a reflection of my ego trying to protect me, unable to accept that instead of being inspiration for something beautiful, I was motivation for war. Not me personally, but ultimately – yes.

At times, I wished someone would hear my ekavian dialect and come up to me to say something mean. I thought that way I might feel less awful.

And then I stopped to think about that – I don’t believe my identity comes from the country I come from, or from any other, and yet I feel uneasy because of that identity. Isn’t that proof that it exists?  And who then took up arms for something that, for me, doesn’t exist, while I, just by feeling uneasy, fell into the same trap.

And so, I arrived in Belgrade. Carrying baggage that is difficult both to pack and unpack. My path to CNA began with a scared little girl on her balcony who could not forget some things or let them fade into memory.

And as for my mother’s worry from the beginning of this story, I still have no idea how you’re meant to “watch out for earthquakes”. But I do know that if the ground beneath our feet starts to shake again, it will be because we finally started jumping hard enough.

If it has to shake, let it shake because of us!