yugoslavias implosion

10
Foreword
time, émigré literature, especially of the Chetnik diaspora. She subsequently
returned to Belgrade to work in the un department of
the foreign service, before being posted to Geneva in 1984, to work
with European issues at the un Commission for Europe. It was at
this time that she encountered members of the Albanian diaspora,
whose discontent with the status of the Socialist Autonomous Province
of Kosovo was palpable, and also members of the Serbian diaspora,
whose views concerning Kosovo were at odds with the views
of Albanians. By the time she returned to Belgrade in 1988, the disintegration
of Yugoslavia was well underway and, within her department,
as elsewhere in the country, there were lively discussions
about the future of the country, with alternative visions sketched
and debated. At the end of 1991, after the outbreak of the Serbian
insurrection in Croatia – an insurrection supported by the Yugoslav
Army, which Serbian President Slobodan Milošević controlled
– she resigned from the foreign service and began opposition work.
Her resignation was, in fact, a protest against the war policy of the
Milošević regime. In collaboration with other anti-war activists, she
launched Anti-War Action and became close to the Civic Alliance, a
liberal political party which has remained on the margins of the Serbian
political scene.
In the meantime, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights
in Yugoslavia had dissolved at the end of the 1980s. In 1994, she took
the lead in establishing the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights
in Serbia, starting with a staff of eight persons. That same year,
the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, based in New York,
awarded her a prize for her work in human rights. Since then, the
Helsinki Committee/Serbia has been active in various domains,
assisting Serb refugees from Croatia in 1995, organizing Serb-Albanian
dialogues, hosting conferences on human rights (especially
focusing on Kosovo), and publishing books, reports, and bulletins in
both Serbian and English across a range of topics from controversies