Interview: Tamara Z and Vanja Š
Mirjana Trifković Marjanović has a law degree, but says that she sees herself as a peace activist, constantly trying to professionally and actively contribute to post-war peace processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mirjana attended the Basic Training in Peacebuilding in 2013 and later the Training for Trainers in 2014. She has taken part in numerous activities organised by the Centre for Nonviolent Action Sarajevo-Belgrade. For us, Mirjana is a longstanding friend and someone we can always count on. We have supported each other, worked together, socialised and learned from each other. Actions to mark unmarked sites of suffering, establishing contacts and building trust with associations of war victims, attending commemorations, taking part in the “School for Different Memory” that Mirjana ran for years in Višegrad, Goražde and Foča are just some of the things we should mention here. For 15 years, Mirjana’s work and activism has built bridges and opened not just closed but locked doors. This is why, as we prepare for a new round of Training for Trainers, we spoke to her about her experience from the previous round of training and what it meant to her.
Can you remember how you found out about the Centre for Nonviolent Action and how you started cooperating with us? What do you remember most from those first encounters?
It’s hard to imagine it’s been a decade since the start of our cooperation and my deeper engagement with processes of personal growth and development, as well as deeper peace activism. When I applied for the Basic Training, I was working at the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Bijeljina. My primary area of activity was not peace work, but I was working on issues of transitional justice and peace education. My personal growth and development are tied first to the Basic Training and later to the Training for Trainers.
My first impressions of working with the Centre for Nonviolent Action are coloured by my questioning: do these people really exist and is someone really delving deeper into peacebuilding and various social issues, but through personal development? I came to understand that there can be no social change without personal change.
The other thing that was fascinating were the relationships between the people on the CNA team. The teamwork and support among the team of trainers for the Basic Training were incredible. When I returned from that training, I immediately told everyone in my office to apply because I thought the experience was important for all of us working on matters of peace.
What was the Basic Training like for you and what did you come away with?
When I saw the call for applications for the Basic Training, I felt I had to apply. While I was writing my application, I didn’t think I would be selected, but I was hopeful. My Basic Training took place in Mavrovo, Macedonia, a place I’d never heard of before.
I was the youngest participant at the Basic Training and during the training itself, I wasn’t fully aware of everything that was going on. I was fully present within the group, but what was happening inside me is something I became aware of only once I got on the bus that would take me back home to Bijeljina.
After the Basic Training, did you start engaging more with topics of peacebuilding and dealing with the past, did you learn any useful skills at the training?
The Training in Peacebuilding was the first time I heard openly from different sides and different participants in the conflict, I had an opportunity to hear how people feel about things that members of my people had done, but I also got the opportunity to speak about how I felt. The Basic Training helped me in my personal growth and development, but it also situated me within peace activism. I came to understand how important it is to engage with topics of peace, connecting people and everything that happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s.
After I completed the Basic Training, and then my work colleague completed it the year after that, the two of us working at the Helsinki Committee in Bijeljina organised a peace training for students from universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was new and different, a different approach, a different way of working and establishing links among students. The two of us running it also strengthened our bond. Looking back, I would say we were very brave, because these young people opened up many questions.
The Basic Training left quite an impression on me, because afterwards I found myself in peace activism and I started working with young people. I did a lot of peace education, the School for Different Memory in Eastern Bosnia, and trainings for students and young people. I also worked with victims of wartime sexual violence, mostly women. These are the areas where my professional work took me. Through the peace education trainings I later ran, I kept talking about how necessary the Basic Training was and I kept telling people to apply.
Did the Basic Training also leave you with a sense of responsibility when you speak out as a peace activist and how do you generally view this issue in the context of peace activism here?
The training also taught us about matters of responsibility. Unfortunately, people who deal with peace topics often do not understand the responsibility that comes with this and often fail to consider things more deeply, so that sometimes maybe some things do more harm than good. Peacebuilding requires going deep, but it also requires making space so that people can hear each other. We need a culture of dialogue, but also a space for disagreement, so that we can then transfer that to the level of society.
From this perspective, I still think that most organisations dealing with peace work are not fully aware of the responsibility that comes with that work. Peacebuilding is not bringing together 20 people of different nationalities and taking them somewhere to hang out and talk about how the sky is blue. When you work with young people, you have a responsibility towards them and to what your training will open up for them. You are responsible for their emotional state, for how they feel at the training and what they leave with, and what they’ll then do in their communities.
Everyone engaged in peace activism should keep re-examining themselves and questioning everything that isn’t working in order to improve. If our ultimate aim is to build a better and more just society in which we will all be heard, we can’t do this without taking responsibility for our work and for the consequences of what we do.
The participants from the training often talk about how it also helped them open some personal processes and issues. Was this the case for you as well?
I think my personal growth and development is also connected to the fact that I was born in Visoko, my mother is from Foča and my father from Ilijaš, but I grew up in Foča. Foča is a very closed community, ethnically mostly one-sided. I had all the prerequisites to grow up with strong ethnic identification, where my ethnic identity would take primacy, but I was lucky enough to grow up among diverse and supportive people.
The training helped me bring awareness to some personal and family matters that I carried consciously or unconsciously, and to work on them myself and with my family.
Why did you apply to the Training for Trainers, and how important was it for you personally and professionally?
It was the logical next step. When I was invited to apply to the Training for Trainers, knowing that it wasn’t a public call for applications, I was happy because it was important to me that someone had recognised my potential to contribute and it was important also for my professional advancement. I continued working on my own personal development through the Training for Trainers, but it was also where I learned to run peace education workshops, experiential exercises, discussions…
This training was quite long, I remember. When the first phase of the ToT was being held, there were floods in BiH and it was difficult for me to make my way from Bijeljina to Dorjan in Macedonia, but I had this enthusiasm to show up and continue working with young people. It was a safe space where I could openly say some things loud and clear, where I never felt fear because of the words I spoke, even though I was only 22 or 23. I was given space to say I agree or I disagree and here’s what I think about the topic we’re discussing.
The Training for Trainers builds you up professionally, and the participants can learn so much from the trainers.
Given that the phases of the training take place over a period of six months, what is it that you remember the most from this creative and intensive period?
It was important for me that we got to develop our own initiatives and we received support for this. It was also important that you kept getting feedback from the trainers, as well as the other participants, because this helped you make improvements before you were in a real situation where you would be implementing something.
We pioneered initiatives in different parts of former Yugoslavia that gave rise to some very good actions. I did them in Eastern Bosnia. It was important for me to work with young people in this area that had been quite closed off up to then.
How would you describe the friendships that started at the Training for Trainers and have lasted to this day?
My friend ended up being my maid of honour. Apart from her, and we did both the Basic Training and the Training for Trainers together, there are also people who work in CNA that I consider true friends. There are a lot of people from the region from both trainings that I stayed very good friends with. With these people, you can be yourself because you coincide on the level of values and you have connected at deeper levels. These friendships are very important to me.
This year the Training for Trainers will be organised again, a decade since the last one. What would you say to people who want to apply?
I would encourage them to take the opportunity. Given the overall situation in the world and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I think we need to have as many people involved not just in peace activism, but generally in things that concern all of us, protecting freshwater sources, forests, the air… Today, these are priorities we didn’t think about ten years ago.
If you were to write a welcoming message for participants in the ToT, what would it say?
Welcome to a life-changing experience.
You have been involved in peace activism for years now. What is your impression of peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina today?
With the distance of time, I get the feeling that peace processes in BiH have stalled in the past ten years. When I started getting involved and delving deeper into these topics, at peace education trainings for young people and the School of Different Memory, I think people were more interested and there was more support. Currently, peace education is thinning out, but we need it more than ever. The young generations of tomorrow are growing up in monoethnic communities, under historical revisionism.
Young people don’t even have the opportunity to meet people of different ethnicities, or when they do, they don’t talk about these things, but work on other topics, which is all good and fine, but it means these important issues are just swept under the rug. There’s a lot of transgenerational trauma which results in a surge of violence, and that is the consequence of the lack of systemic support for people who have gone through war, who suffer from PTSD, women who have suffered various forms of violence, and this is then passed on through families. Young people are growing up in a society that is full of violence.
Peacebuilding was not systemic ten years ago or earlier, but today it seems to be deliberately fragmented. Despite this, there are people and organisations that are still engaged, such as CNA, Kvart, veterans’ associations and others. These are people whose work starts from personal experience and enthusiasm and provides support for others, opening up space for collaboration.
How do we convey to young generations the importance of continuous peacebuilding and how do we present everything that happened in the past, events where they were not participants but whose consequences still affect them in some ways today?
The most illustrative example of this is a situation from two years ago when I was working on a project called “Symbols of a Lost Past” with students from Sarajevo and Istočno Sarajevo. A young woman in her twenties told me in the introductory round that she had applied because her father had gone off to war in Syria, and he had been a child during the war in BiH. She had come in order to start dealing with these issues, because she had seen what was happening in her family. When I work with young people, I organise the training so that I can see what they need at that moment. It’s important for me to make a safe space where they can hear each other, feel secure and be what they are. This is how I try to covey issues related to peacebuilding.
How do we approach peacebuilding given the fact that it has been 30 or more years since the war(s)?
After the 1990s war, we didn’t do anything systemic on peacebuilding. It wasn’t achieved through the four pillars of transitional justice either. The most progress was made with testifying in war crimes trials, but the focus was not on peace processes. There are more and more people, veterans, witnesses of crimes who do not want to talk about the past, because they see no point to it, just a way to be retraumatised. However, I believe that personal testimony is the most effective way of working with young people because through somebody else’s experience, or after visiting a site of suffering, young people come to understand why what we are talking about is important and they develop empathy.
It is hard to work on peacebuilding in BiH because without a systemic approach, peace work in BiH has come down to individuals and this is why young people remain each in their ethnic pen being taught and doing what someone else thinks they should learn and do.
Peacebuilding shouldn’t be imposed, but it should be part of our life the way it is. There doesn’t have to be a war in order for us to build peace. We should build a society where we will live better, feel safer, respect the rights of minorities, the LGBTIQ+ community and build and atmosphere in which everyone will feel secure in their country. All of this is linked to the process of peacebuilding.