The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

and intellectual elites who led the conflict and who dug the remains of
the dead of earlier wars out of their graves, so as to drive more people
into the abyss. The numerous attempts by initiatives and individuals,
clergymen, mothers, professors or artists, who tried to prevent the war
by meetings, conferences and large demonstrations, were disregarded.
Their behaviour before, during and after the war is the link to the process
of peace and reconciliation.
The disintegration resulted from the interplay of various internal factors
at the moment when Yugoslavia no longer felt threatened from the outside
– and indeed was not. The collapse came when the country’s own
politicians were no longer able to turn the wheel around and lead the
country out of the crisis peacefully. Like the people, they thought they
were part of the modern and developed, civilized world, and hoped for
foreign assistance in the economic and political crisis. The help didn’t
come, or it came too late, when the armed power struggle was already
being waged.
Yugoslavia was possible only as a homogeneous, liberal state, not as a
community sufficient unto itself, but as space in which the national differences
are considered an enrichment.
The equal rights of women
The fact that some two million women had supported the people’s war
of liberation, and that 110,000 of them had fought as partisans, ensured
them the right to vote in 1945, and the constitutional guarantee of equal
rights. At their first congress in 1944, the Yugoslav women had founded
their organization, the Antifascist Women’s Front. After the war, edu cated
women organized literacy classes, health and political education, cul tural
programmes and social assistance for the population in the whole country.
They helped clear the rubble, and participated in the large-scale work
campaigns to build housing and infrastructure. The Antifascist Women’s
Front was a good platform from which they could also fight against the
patriarchal structures, against discrimination against women, and for
their participation in education and the work force. When the movement
acquired great importance socially and politically, this became its
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