For several years we have heard horrific stories about Serbs beseiging Sarajevo and other cities and towns in Bosnia and Croatia, killing thousands of defenceless people, committing rape on a massive scale, torturing prisoners and political detainees.
In spite of the truth of the reports, our idea of who Serbs are as a people has become distorted. For many the word "Serb" has become a synonym for "terrorist". Given what we think we know of "the Serbian character" the UN sanctions seem a mild response.
In March 1994 I travelled to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, to meet Serbs who kill no one, oppose violence, help the victims of war and are rarely the object of press attention.... Because of UN sanctions there are no flights to Belgrade so we flew to Budapest. We had with us two large cartons of medicines for refugee children, contributed by Franciscan Sisters in Rome. We waited anxiously in our minibus on Hungary's side of the border. Under the sanctions, medicines may enter Serbia only by special permit obtainable through a complex bureaucratic process that takes months. After waiting an hour, border guards quickly checked our baggage and did not notice the cartons.
While Belgrade means White City, its beauty has darkened. It looks exhausted. Except on a few streets, the facade of every building has eroded. Because of the high cost of fuel, cars are scarce on the streets and buses are packed. Stores are well stocked but little is sold because people have little money to spend and prices are inflated.
Soon after our arrival we met with Patriarch Pavle, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church... His manner is modest and gentle. He is amongst the very few church heads who normally travels by public bus and tram. He took part in the huge demonstration in 1991 protesting the war and the policies of the Milosevic government...
There is a major obstacle to the Patriarch's proposal of a joint religious witness for peace, The poor relations between the Orthodox and Catholic churches. Resentment towards the Catholic Church still smoulders in the Orthodox world. From the crusaders sacking of Constantinople to the Catholic Church's current missionary efforts in Russia....
Patriarch Pavle spoke about the war crimes : "There are criminals on every side. God alone knows who has the greatest blame, or who has committed the most sins. (The church) must condemn all atrocities that are committed, no matter the faith or origin of the person committing them. No sin committed by one person justifies a sin committed by another".
SERBIAN PEACEMAKERS
Some Serbs are not preoccupied with past suffering but are helping today's victims. I met some in Pancevo, near Belgrade. Here every Saturday night, members of the peace action group "M" (for mir, meaning peace) light candies and display a banner for half an hour in the town square. The simple text reads, "FOR ALL THE VICTIMS OF WAR'.
The person chiefly responsible for this simple witness, going on since the war began, is Senka Mandrino. "I do this for my country, the old Yugoslavia, not the new one, but the Yugoslavia for everyone"... Mandrino has a sister in Sarajevo and her husband Mirko, one of the leading members of the group is a conscientious objector. "I will continue with the Saturday night vigil until the war ends", she told me.
In Belgrade I met Arsenije Nikitovic, a monk who directs an Orthodox Church programme that distributes food to families who are otherwise in danger of starvation. "it isn't hard to find families desperately in need of food , he said. "And now we stretch what we give to 1,100 families, but it is far from enough". He needs a minibus to make deliveries, and he needs more donations of food. He receives most of the food from the Evangelical Church in Germany. "Who is most guilty in this war?" he asked. "I have no right to judge. Only we must do what Jesus said: " to feed the hungry, to help and visit those who are sick. God will judge us for what we do and what we fail to do, and he will judge those who caused this suffering".
Sasa Kovacevic used to be a student in Sarajevo but left on the eve of the siege. "You can't imagine how easy it was to live there. I quickly found many friends. I only hope they are still alive. Now I am in Belgrade, but I am here with only half my heart. The other half is in Sarajevo" Things have changed a great deal in Belgrade in the past two years, she said. "You see what propaganda can do. People are afraid that if they say anything critical, they will be accused of wanting to sell the country to its enemies. In many people you see a mentality of total paranoia - the whole world against us, enemies everywhere: Croats, Muslims, Catholics, Jews, everyone, not Serbian. For many people it was the UN sanctions that proved to them everything President Slobodan Milosevic was saying. They accepted the idea that the only solution is for Serbian people to be completely united. So people get very irritated when you try to say that Milosevic didn't help us but destroyed us. What destroys us is hating people.
WOMEN IN BLACK
In Jerusalem every week, Jewish and Palestinian women together protest the occupation. Called Women in Black, this group has spawned other such groups, including one in Belgrade. "What got me involved in Women in Black", said Jasmina Mustovic, on forced leave from the national airline, now volunteer press officer of Women in Black, "was it gave me a way to take a stand against violence- violence against women and children - and war.
"Right now Yugoslavia is not even the Third World... we are actually being used for experiments- to see how long one diabetic can survive without insulin, or to study the spread of typhus and tuberculosis under these circumstances. They are spreading fast", she reported bitterly. "We have less and less basic medical equipment than can be used, because machines in hospitals and clinics break down and replacement parts cannot be obtained because of the sanctions or cannot be afforded. Meanwhile the armies on every side seem to have no end of money. "You know one bullet costs one mark, if they shoot one bullet in one second, can you imagine how many marks are spent just for those bullets in four years? I don't want to calculate it and I'm not even talking about grenades and bombs and all the other military equipment".
SANCTIONS
"Sanctions kill people just as effectively as weapons of war," said Bishop Irinej of Novi Sad. "Please understand, people are suffering, children are dying, unborn children are punished in their mothers' wombs because they cannot get needed medication. Truly Christ is suffering. Our nation has been made into a ghetto. In principle the sanctions are not supposed to be a barrier to medicines but in reality they are. We have seen shipments of medicines wait on the border for months before being permitted into our country, and by that time many of them are too old to be used".
WAR RESISTERS
Many groups in Belgrade-nearly all of them linked formally or informally with the Centre for Anti-War Action - are working on projects that challenge nationalism. One project is to build a museum of anti-war resistance, not in a building but more a place. Three women behind the idea are : Sonja Prodanovic) architect and active in Women in Black) Zdenka Milivojevic and Marina Blagojevic, professors of sociology.
What they have in mind isn't a museum in the usual sense. It is more a place as Blagojevic said, "which would treat what is usually called the history of wars as the history of failures, but failures which can help us learn how to live together without more such failure." "We want to make the other side of history visible," Prodanovic explained, "What is not generally known in the world and even to most people in exYugoslavia ) is how many people opposed the civil war and how many people have done what they could to help others during the war.
Otficial pro-war ideologies in ex-Yugoslavia have relied on the negative picture of the 'other' created in mass media, with each nation pictured as a. victim of another nation, " Prodanovic said, "Peaceful history was reinterpreted as a history of hidden hatred. Many of us have survived owing to help and solidarity from other people. Many of us believe that peace is still possible. we believe that human solidarity is stronger than hatred. Although we have been constantly exposed to stories of violence and destruction) we still tell each other stories about good-will, help and sacrifice. In this way we know there is another side to history. It is in time of war that peace initiatives should be supported. It is now that we must start remembering and preserving the other side of our history."
Just as war was created by an interpretation of history as history of wars and hatred", said Blagojevic, "peace can be created and nourished by the interpretation of history as a history of living together. Even in the Balkans people have lived together longer in peace than in war."
* Original article in ONE WORLD June 1994, pp.16-18.