The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

goslavia was a prison only for the Serbian people. The supporters of the
Greater Serbian idea put heavy pressure on the Serbian and Yugoslav
leaderships to get tough with the Albanians in Kosovo. Kosovo was pronounced
the issue determining the survival and destiny of the Serbian
people. ... “In March 1989 ..., the Serbian constitution was changed and
placed above the Yugoslav constitution. With this act, Serbia in effect
seceded and withdrew from the Yugoslav state. Unfortunately, the act
and its implications were taken seriously neither in Yugoslavia nor abroad.”
(Report, p. 91).
When the Albanians in Kosovo protested against these changes in the
autonomy of their province by Serbia, they were fired upon, and twentytwo
people were killed. In June 1989, two million people gathered on
the Kosovo Polje (“field of the blackbirds”) to commemorate the 600th
anniversary of the lost battle of Kosovo. “In his speech, Milosevic announced
that Serbs were once again fighting a battle – without weap -
ons, although that was not precluded. This remark too was not taken
seriously, it provoked no reactions.” (Report, p. 91).
In 1990, the process of the disintegration of Yugoslavia was radicalized.
“Virtually all Serbs considered the elections in Slovenia as the Slovenian
secession from Yugoslavia and those in Croatia as the triumph of the
Ustaša [the wartime Croatian fascist party]. The results were used as a
message and a call to the masses to continue the national struggle, even
with weapons.” (Report, p. 94)
However, the war and its justification in nationalisms unfolded in the
context of an existential economic crisis.
“The 2700% inflation before the outbreak of the war in 1991 – like that
in Europe during the 1920s – threatened people’s very livelihoods, especially
in the larger towns. There were reports of people who killed themselves
because they were hungry and couldn’t pay their electricity bills.
In this situation, the interest in the preservation of the state was lost.
The media had a major part in this, interpreting and disseminating the
daily news in national terms. Anti-nationalism was discredited as the inheritance
of the socialist regime, and Tito demonized as a ‘totalitarian
Bolshevik’ by the Croatian and Serbian national leaders alike. A new me-
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