The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and to bring the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating
table. Since they themselves did not want to intervene militarily
any more than their Nato allies did, somebody else had to do it. That
some body was Croatia, which received strategic assistance from the USA
for that purpose. The Croatian armed forces expanded their operations
in Bosnia-Herzegovina so far that the USA had to forbid them from taking
the city of Banja Luka, which had already been deserted by its residents,
to prevent a possible humanitarian catastrophe. Thus was the Serbian
Republic within Bosnia-Herzegovina maintained, so as to establish a bal -
ance of forces.
New Legends
In socialist Yugoslavia, the truth about the Second World War was cov -
ered over by ideological interpretations. History served the purposes of
political propaganda, in which there were always very many heroes and
very few war criminals. After the war of the 1990s, this tradition was
con tinued. All sides equated their own actions with the war of liberation
during the Second World War, and gave their fighters flats and war pensions;
all have felt themselves the victim, and have denied or down -
played their own crimes. Under the pressure to change – so as to attain
admission to the EU, but particularly as a result of the trials before the
International Court of Justice in The Hague – the truth about the war
crimes has been disclosed. It isn’t easy to speak about guilt and responsibility,
particularly one’s own. Many people were involved directly or indirectly,
as criminals or as passive spectators; frequently they were
neighbours, friends, employees, fellow citizens. It would be much sim -
pler if only lunatics or monsters – abnormal cases – were responsible
for the war and its crimes. Now, the victims are talking constantly about
the violations of the Geneva Convention on Refugees, about the torture
and murder camps, about the sieges of the cities, about the targeted
shooting of innocent people, about the mass murders, rapes and expulsions
– as long as the perpetrators do not.
Abroad too, new legends have emerged about this war, such as the
claim that Germany supposedly triggered it by recognizing the independence
of Slovenia and Croatia. That recognition was carried out on De-
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