The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

was only the will to create a greater Serbia. Miloševic ´
had the enormous
war machine of the Yugoslav People’s Army. Yugoslavia couldn’t have
been smashed; the people couldn’t have been forced into massive flight,
had the terrible crimes not been committed.
Amongst the officers there were also those who preferred to kill themselves
in the face of this war, rather than shoot at their own people. This
powerful army could have wrought even more destruction, had there
not been moderates amongst its officers. But there were also those
amongst the officers, such as General Ratko Mladic, ´ who ordered the
massacre of Srebrenica, who connected their military skill with the hatred
and the euphoric will to avenge the victims of their own families
and of all Serbian victims of earlier times.
There were many groups of young men who felt like the losers of society,
who were in most cases unemployed before the war, let off steam
as football hooligans, and got a feeling of security and importance in the
paramilitary units, and who took revenge on the successful, modern and
prosperous citizens by robbing their possessions, mostly electrical appliances
and cars, burnng down their houses, locking them in torture
and extermination camps, and killing them.
There were also normal people, who worked abroad, even here in Germany,
who took organized bus trips to the war region on the weekends,
to shoot and to loot there. And there was terrible violence and murders
amongst the victims.
None of this needs to have happened. A Yugoslavia fully integrated into
Europe, with a developed protection of human rights and economic development,
with its identity consolidated by care of language, culture,
tradition and religion, was absolutely possible. It could have been preserved
as a free and flexible union and not as a gaggle of small, questionable
nation-states. Civil society in Serbia too was against the war,
and felt abandoned by the world in view of the lack of demonstrations
against nationalism and the war outside Yugoslavia. It is still hard for
people to understand that the view predominating in Europe was that
all Serbs, all Croats, all Muslims, all Albanians and all others were sunk
in hatred for each other and wanted war. For it was the political, religious
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