The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

The representative of the constituency of the city of Zagreb, Ante Pavelic,
was among the horrified witnesses. Soon thereafter, when the Serbian
king proclaimed the royal dictatorship under the name “Kingdom
of Yugoslavia” and pronounced himself king of all Yugoslavs, dissolved
parliament and abolished the constitution, Pavelic founded the armed
resistance movement, the Ustaša (the Rebels) in his Zagreb flat. He there -
upon left Yugoslavia and settled in Rome with a small group of his supporters,
where he gradually became a Serb-hating extremist.
Public life in Yugoslavia during the next few years was dominated by
corruption and nepotism. There was discontent not only in Croatia, but
also in Macedonia, where Serbianization triggered terrorist counteractions.
The Albanian majority and the Serbian minority in Kosovo conducted
bloody battles. Guerrilla units supported by Italy, Bulgaria and
Albania infiltrated Yugoslav territory they claimed, and made the lives of
the people even more difficult.
In 1918, an integrated Yugoslav society had still seemed possible; now
however, it was beyond all reach. Nationalism as an ideology of external
exclusion and of internal integration had split the population and become
an instrument of discrimination of all non-Serbian segments of the pop -
ulation of Yugoslavia. On October 9, 1934, King Alexander was murdered
by Croatian and Macedonian terrorists in France. No change resulted.
Not until only a week before the outbreak of the Second World War in
1939 was limited autonomy within the Yugoslav state granted to Croatia
for the first time.
The union of the south-Slavic peoples was carried out after the large
multinational empires, the Habsburg monarchy and Ottoman Empire,
broke apart and Europe was divided up into sovereign nation-states.
Apart from the medieval kingdoms of the Serbs and the early kingships
of the Croatians and Bosnians, the Yugoslav peoples have lived for the
greatest part of their history under foreign rule and separated from one
another, their populations greatly mixed, their various regions very differently
development, their life-styles and their legal traditions different.
Nevertheless, there had been no major conflicts amongst them during
this long period. That provided a good opportunity for the foundation of
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