The third peacebuilding training for students from BiH is complete. It was held from 22 to 28 February 2019 at the Emaus Centre in Potoci near Mostar. The training was attended by 19 students from across BiH and from diverse social backgrounds. The training team comprised Davorka Turk, Dalmir Mišković, Tamara Zrnović, Nedžad Novalić and Nedžad Horozović. A total of 96 people applied for the training, 30 men and twice as many women, 66. This is why, in addition to the unexpectedly high number of cancellations, it was impossible to have a gender balanced group. Because of last-minute cancellations, we ended up with one less participant and uneven gender representation in the group, with 13 women and 6 men attending the training.
Talking with the training participants, the training team got the impression that students often apply for a host of trainings and seminars, often only dimly aware of what they are applying for, and only decide whether they will attend any given training once they receive their acceptance notice. This is a significant indication for organising student trainings in peacebuilding in the future and should lead to rethinking the application process in time for the next training.
We identified the need for this type of peace education geared at students for the first time four years ago, when we organised the first peacebuilding training for students from BiH. The idea was to provide a peacebuilding foundation for the development of the future generation of public opinion and policy makers and give them an opportunity to view the Bosnian-Herzegovinian context more broadly and develop sensitivity for others and those who are different. We especially wanted to sensitise those who would drive social development in the future to processes that lead to a spiral of violence and its extreme escalation into war, and give them an opportunity and a safe space to learn how to break the mould that leads to legitimating and reproducing injustice and violence.
Spiral of Violence
The concept for the third training was somewhat different compared to the previous two peacebuilding trainings for students. Operating within a shorter time frame, the idea was to create a safe space for opening up the complex issues that keep putting up stumbling blocks in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian context.
The methodology was based on experiential learning, which stands in stark contrast to what students are used to at their universities, namely, it involves much less lecturing and a lot more group work. We started the training with topics aimed at creating basic trust among the participants. The group soon developed a sense of cohesion and closeness, which later created some minor difficulties because it made people reluctant to enter into open confrontations. However, encouraging stronger confrontations along ethnic, ideological and political lines would not be constructive given the length of the training and the specifics of the group. Still, the training team came away with the impression that things did not remain at the superficial level of political correctness and feigned cohesion.
Initially, we dealt with the mechanisms that generate inequalities in our society and with being able to recognise and become sensitive to such mechanisms. The training participants exhibited a readiness to give and receive criticism and to work on unpacking social patterns of behaviour they had been taught and had become accustomed to. Particularly important were the workshops dealing with discrimination and violence, and the way we treat each other within our communities and our society. By playing out different social roles, of the more and the less privileged, we opened up issues of the kind of structural and cultural violence that crushes those with fewer opportunities in society and also showed the ways in which we all enable violence and injustice by turning a blind eye.
(Id)entity Boxes
In the second part of the training we tackled topics that create the most difficulty in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian context, namely, national identity and the way we view the war. There was a lot of discussion, exchange and topics commonly considered difficult were broached. The safe space we managed to create enabled us to speak openly about our identities and to bring awareness to the ways society categorises us and boxes us into identities.
The following sentence stands out from this part of the training: “All our identities are equally important to us until they are threatened, then the most threatened become the most important.” This sentence perhaps best describes the BiH context and the way national identities overpower all others. Showing the documentary “Alien Home“ produced by the Centre for Nonviolent Action opened up a discussion on the direct consequences of our national relations and ethnic-spatial divides, and about how our national-societal concept discriminates against those that do not belong to the majority in any given area.
The film opened up the way to talk about the war. Though most of the participants were born after it was over, almost all had felt the lasting legacy of the war on their own skin. We devoted special attention to the way we talk about the war and mapped similarities and differences between the war narratives of the three(+) sides involved in the conflict inside Bosnia and Herzegovina. The war and narratives about it are often used to legitimate new tensions and to fuel politicians’ ambitions to stay in power.
Thematically, the high point of the training was the workshop with three war veterans who used to belong to enemy armies: Amer Delić, a veteran of ARBiH, Spasoje Kulaga, a veteran of VRS, and Stanislav Krezić, a veteran of HVO, told us about their life and wartime experiences, their motivation for going into the war and the general situation in those times from before most of today’s students were born. Through a dynamic and emotional exchange, a common sense emerged that the war damaged the veterans’ generation and that we must not allow it to damage another. A statement from one of the veterans was particularly memorable: “It is better to talk and negotiate for a hundred years than to wage war for even one day.” This statement is all the more poignant because it is spoken by someone who devoted a significant part of their life to war.
After the training was completed and we parsed through our impressions, I can say that I came out of this training motivated and empowered for further peace work, not just with students, but with the public at large. It was very important for me to see how the generation born after the war thinks, how they view the dramatic past they learn about from their elders. Bringing twenty young people of diverse national backgrounds together in BiH is still quite a feat, and even more so when it is done around the topics of this training. It seems to us that the (inter-ethnic) distance and boundaries among young people are stronger than in the case of the first two trainings with students, despite a sincere desire to bridge these gulfs. The participants also demonstrated a high level of readiness to work and effect changes, which gives hope that social processes will take a more positive turn in the future.
Somehow, I hope that the participants will remember this training at some fateful moment when they are in positions of responsibility and will make decisions to move Bosnia and Herzegovina towards a happier future, as opposed to their predecessors in such responsible positions.
The photo gallery from the training can be viewed HERE