The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

small organization with only some 30,000 members and characterized
mainly by arrogance, capriciousness greed and corruption, was never
able to win broad support amongst the Croatian people.
Just as Hitler in his blind hatred wanted to make Europe “free of Jews”,
Pavelic Pavelić
wanted to make Croatia free of Serbs. Serbs, orthodox Christians,
made up some 30% of the Croatian population at that time, and
were ethnologically indistinguishable from the Croats, who were Catholics.
According to his plan, one third of the Serbian population, primarily
the men of military age, were to be killed, one third deported, and one
third, primarily women and children, forced to convert to Catholicism.
Nor did other Yugoslav peoples escape the nationalistic madness. Royal -
ist Serbs organized themselves in Cetniks ˇ (troops), particularly after the
Ustaša started persecuting Serbs, and committed great massacres
against the Croatian and Muslim people; at times, they collaborated with
the Italians and Germans, helped exterminate the Jews and Roma
people, and fought the partisans. Their goal was a Greater Serbian kingdom,
including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and large
parts of Croatia. Some other peoples also collaborated with the Germans
and Italians, such as Kosovar Albanians and Macedonians seeking protection
from the attacks of Serbian nationalists. However, the period of
the Second World War was primarily marked by the Serbo-Croatian war,
which was waged on both sides with utmost brutality.
The resistance movement
In 1941, the Yugoslavian Communist Party was called upon by the Comintern
to organize resistance to tie down German troops in the Balkans.
At first, the party found hardly any support in the sorely afflicted, insecure
population, which was at the mercy of attacks by all kinds of armed
groups, and in their need, as always, depended on the good relations
with their neighbours. Therefore, the party members carried out some
attacks on the Germans themselves. The revenge exacted by the Wehrmacht,
which, for every one of its men killed, executed one hundred
local people herded together at random, and even including schoolchildren,
caused peasants, members of other parties, people from all national
and religious groups, and for the first time in history even women,
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