The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

morial culture was to be forged, nationalism rehabilitated and antifascism
called into question. In Serbia, the etniks were celebrated as antifascists,
and in Croatia, the Ustaša were revered as heroes and
defenders of their people. This process was underpinned by the disclosure
of the covered-up crimes of the communist government at the end
of the Second World War. To spread hatred and panic, Serb nationalists
used the memory of the Jasenovac extermination camp, in which the
Croatian Ustaša had killed thousands of Jews, Roma, Serbs and antifascists.
The Croatian nationalists used the memory of Bleiburg, where
partisans had killed thousands of their opponents after the British had
prevented their flight to the west. Like a boomerang, the suppressed
stories returned and fostered the thirst for revenge.
“The ideational connection which had arisen as ‘fraternity and unity’ in
the common partisan movement, the link connecting the Yugoslav
peoples which transcended all historical and everyday barriers, was thus
broken. The last threads broke when the same massacred corpse was
shown at the same time on the television news in Belgrade and in Zagreb
– as the victim of Croats and of Serbs, respectively. Planned murders,
often of moderate, peace-oriented and sensible people, spread
fear which increased to panic. The tension produced the feeling of hav -
ing to defend oneself and one’s own people, as the partisans and the
other earlier heroes had done. In coloured uniforms obtained from a variety
of modern armies and adorned with etnik and Ustaša decorations,
the insanity of the civil war of the Second World War era was revived.
The calls to ‘defend hearth and home’ returned as the terror, the suppressed,
the unspoken, to the new generation. And the nerves of the
people were stretched to the breaking point.” (Report, p.97)
The reality of war finally shocked public opinion throughout Europe. Bosiljka
Schedlich’s report recalls the atrocities of this war up through the
Dayton Agreement, and asks:
“The key question however is, who wanted the war and who was forced
into it. The Yugoslav people believed until the end that there would be
no war – and that if there were, then only where both sides wanted it.
Everyone ignored Kosovo and the Albanians. In the case of Slovenia,
everyone was horrified. In the case of Croatia, everyone thought it must
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