Organised by Peace Action Prilep/Tetovo, an advanced training in dealing with the past was held from 11 to 25 April 2016 in Kruševo. Peace Action sought the support of CNA for this training, given that it was the first advanced training they were organising and CNA already had experience in this area. The team included Goran Taleski, Boro Kitanoski and Fllanza Jusufi from Peace Action, and Katarina Milićević from CNA.
The group was pre-selected from among participants at previous back trainings organised by Peace Action, and the training itself was aimed at building capacities for activism in the Macedonian context. The participants were invited to the training based on their previous participation in basic training, and their local community activism experience. They were made up of young people, almost all of them under 30, mostly Albanians and Macedonians. However, just a few days before the training, the already tense situation in Macedonia was further exacerbated by the decision of the president to terminate criminal investigations into politicians involved in various affairs, so a number of participants, particularly activists, cancelled their participation. The training team also faced the dilemma of what to do given the situation in the country, but we decided to press on in line with our initial plan, because processes of democratisation are not short or limited to a few days, and we thought we would be more useful to both individuals and society doing the training than participating in the protests during those 10 days.
The idea of the training was to expand the basic training by focusing on the topics of dealing with the past and peacebuilding in more blocks and in more detail. The group engaged in interesting workshops related to creative conflict resolution, identity and discrimination, where the participants demonstrated their creative potential, which was inspirational for the group and motivational for the training team, leading to giving priority to creative exercises over “polemic-discussion” activities.
The workshops on dealing with the past and peacebuilding did not lead to the expected confrontations within the group, or even to self-reflection on the established and prevalent ways of thinking about the “enemy” and “own heroes”. There was a sense of reservation on the part of the participants, on the one hand doubting their “competence” because they had been children during the conflict, and on the other not wanting to disrupt a level of friendliness and closeness created in the group, because they seemed to be satisfied by the mere fact that they had met each other and were jointly participating in something.
I had the same impression after working with students in Bosnia and Herzegovina, namely, that young people are so excited by simply being together in one place, being able to connect with each other on a personal level, that they fear encroaching on “difficult subjects” would spoil their good relations. It would seem that they have so little opportunity to communicate amongst each other and that these meetings in themselves are for them a facet of peacebuilding, which they are in a sense, but it would appear that the expectation of the training team for deeper exploration was overestimated.
Another point of concern is the diminished number of activists prepared to engage with peacebuilding and dealing with the past throughout the region, resulting from a decreased number of non-governmental organisations compared to the previous decade, which has reduced activist potential, but the need of our societies for activism was not lessened.
The team itself experienced difficulties due to the absence of one of the members of the team on account of their being ill and the failure to timely communicate these difficulties within the team. On the other hand, despite this difficulty, it was very challenging to test out new set-ups and exercises, which the team members used to develop their training experience and skills, support each other and keep up with the tempo and the needs of the group.