The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

the collapse of communism and the Soviet empire, Yugoslavia lost this
position. Starting in January 1989, when the Hungarian parliament introduced
a multi-party system, through November 1989, when the Berlin
Wall came down, until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, communist
power collapsed throughout East Europe – largely without bloodshed.
But not in Yugoslavia, where the army shot at its own citizens.
The Serbian leadership and the army leadership prevented Stipe Mesic, ´
as a member of a non-communist party, from assuming the office of
president and commander-in-chief of the army. Thus, Yugoslavia and its
army remained leaderless. While the overthrow of communism was cel -
ebrated in other European countries, the tanks of the Yugoslav People’s
Army drove from Belgrade towards Vukovar to protect the grip on power
of the last communist leadership. Vukovar and many other towns and
villages were soon reduced to rubble. With no foreign enemy, against
which they had been trained to fight, the army waged war against its
own people.
The new leaders and the people
Miloševic´ had been the first to realize that Tito and his era had died; he
appeared as a saviour and offered a way out for all the frustrations of
the Yugoslav and later the Serbian people. He became their catastrophe,
for never have their losses been as great as under his leadership. His
success was in his ability to suggest to different groups that he represented
exactly their positions – the communist, the fascist, the liberal,
the Yugoslav position, whatever was just then needed. His power was
a product of a Greater Serbian ideology which had been created long
before his time, and had received legitimacy from the “Memorandum”.
Miloševic´ only implemented it; otherwise, someone else would have
done so. The spirit of war had been growing for a long time. In many
books published before the war, the Yugoslav concept of Yugoslavia was
described as a Serbian prison, and it was said that the time spent in Yugoslavia
had been lost time for the Serbian people, which must now return
to its roots.
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