The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

confidence of the people, who frequently sought refuge with the partisans,
as they fled from the attacks by the nationalistic units.” (Report,
p. 79).
The Partisan movement under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito liberated
Yugoslavia, which in 1945 became a communist, federal state. Bosiljka
Schedlich notes, summarizing the country’s history prior to 1989: “Yugo -
slavia was a conglomeration of several nations, languages, cultures and
religions. It has been heir to four different cultural/civilizational realms: the
Byzantine, the Mediterranean, the Central European and the Islamic. ...
During the Second World War, the country also experienced a brutal civil
war alongside the struggle for liberation. During the forty-six years there -
after, Yugoslavia was Stalinist for seven years and then grew from a
centralist state to the most open socialist state that ever existed. Thus,
Yugoslavia experienced capitalism and communism, fascism, occupation
and civil war.” (Report, p. 105).
The Yugoslav and European public did not realize how the situation
began to change in 1981, after Tito’s death. Bosiljka Schedlich gives a pre -
cise account of the events in her report: “... Students in Prishtina demonstrated
for better food at the university canteen. Workers all over
Kosovo joined them, and demanded higher wages. The police shot into
the demonstration and killed thirteen people. The persecution, arrests and
torture of Albanians became an everyday occurrence, they were dismissed
from all important positions, and their children expelled from the
schools, since they were no longer allowed to speak Albanian. The deaths
in Kosovo aroused no indignation in the country. In the national pecking
order in Yugoslavia … Albanians were just one rung above the Roma.”
(Report, p. 89).
A memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science and Art in 1986 accused
the Titoist regime of being “anti-Serbian and of having prevented
a Serbian state within the federation, of having suppressed Serbia politically
and economically, and of having thrust Serbia into a subordinate
role. Claiming that Serbs in Kosovo and Croatia were threatened and
forced to emigrate or assimilate, they urgently demanded intervention to
protect their cultural and national integrity. ... Now, they said, Titoist Yu-
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