I owe a lot to CNA. It’s hard to count it all without making it sound as a (self) praise. Before the moment I applied for a basic training in peacebuilding, I had been working in Croatian Radiotelevision for 15 years and was extremely
burdened with relations of power in the society, balance of power inside such an ideologically and technically complex working organization that a public television production programme was and I was unable to articulate my own resistance. That’s probably how one can describe the sense of “apathy” that angry social and newspaper commentators ascribe to the citizens.
I’ve written this because there are more people who feel that way. Everything’s bothering you, but you don’t know what’s bothering you the most. Above the general criticism of the decisions of the ruling parties, mechanisms and discourses they use in order to stay in power or capitalize on what they gained in the war, because those are only the consequences. Since I had had the opportunity and chance to get to know the way in which CNA worked I have been thinking for a long time that I have quite well scrutinized all those layers of my own anguish – an invitation to forget the symbolic space of the former Yugoslavia, which I was supposedly obliged to do, having been a Croatian citizen; various instances and manifestations of the oppression based on race, gender or ethnicity and the alleged inevitability of armed conflicts that resulted from it; lack or unattainability of social power that could change such order of things. I do think that there are ways to take apart such an overall sense of apathy into pieces one can work with. I do think that an individual possesses an awareness and an ability to turn to the society, the environment he/she lives in, to realize his/hers actions (or inactivity) and their consequences.
My coming to Sarajevo has in many ways made me shut my mouth, because there is no recipe for survival in a post-Yugoslav society in transition. What has happened is that, for the umpteenth time in my life, I had to face my own prejudices, before everything else. Things are not the same for all of us, life is better in Croatia (it’s been better in Croatia all along) and Croatia is going to join the EU next year (which is not very promising, but at this moment, it makes all the difference). The war took away many things from me, just as it did from many others. However, I thought I could put it in the past tense. Here, it defines everyday life, you cannot escape from it, therefore you need intensely to just forget about it because there’s an impression that nothing major will change now, by thinking about the things that once happened. This is not the case only in Bosnia, the same thing is being done in Croatia, but allegedly Croatia can afford that kind of luxury. That frustrates me even more because in Croatia we act as if we had nothing to do with the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, therefore we bear no responsibility for this country and its future, whatsoever. You come, you tear it down, you leave it like that. You forget about it.
I do not think that’s the way to do it. I’ve never been Yugo-nostalgic, I think a lot of things with that state- federation in question were not right, hence we now have to deal with the things that we had buried beneath the “brotherhood and unity” which we gave up, the first chance we had. It’s important for me to see how those national defence mechanisms function, why they are best expressed in a time of crisis, what are the discourses that keep reviving them constantly and what they are for. It’s important to me that the CNA works with veterans of all three warring sides, along with working with concerned citizens, activists, political party activists, journalists, scientists. It’s important to me that we are dealing with the ways in which our societies (do not) remember the past, how they re-construct it all over again and what the pillars of nationally based memory are. I do not think that there’s something “natural” in any kind of oppression. There are mechanisms for conveying and learning such things. Of course that I, as well as Amer, want to see what’s happened to us. And what do we do with it.