From: wam@zamir-zg.comlink.de (Wam Kat)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia
Subject: Zagreb Diary
Date: 21 Aug 92 16:35:00 GMT
Organization: ComLink-Network Germany - For Peace Zagreb


Zagreb Diary
20-08-1992

Dobar Dan,

The RAF Herculeses are flying again, a new agreement is made 
with all side to secure that they wouldn't shoot at them 
again. On the other hand more land runs are made and most or 
wondering what is more dangerous. In the last month 2 
UNPROFOR soldiers where killed in action, but you never know. 

Izetbegovic said that BiH army has now over 100.000 soldier 
and that they will fight till the last part of BiH is under 
their control again, he is absolute against the London canton 
for BiH proposal. 

This morning the last 500 Jews left Sarajevo in the hope to 
make their way to Split, After over a thousand years to town 
is without any Jews, even in the second world war, when 
nearly all Jews in NAZI occupied parts of former Yugoslavia, 
where or killed or went out, there were still Jews in 
Sarajevo. Now the town is without them. I was looking at the 
pictures when I was eating my breakfast, Matzos my mother 
send from the Netherlands.

My day started at with a nice long talk with some 
representative of a Danish Refugee organisation, those who 
are going to rebuild old JNA barracks to make them ready for 
refugees to be used during the winter. Sitting in the sun 
nicely in front of a pub, one of his first question was "What 
do you need now badly" And of course what could I answer else 
than "A mobile telephone", what would you have said when your 
office is always overcrowded with people and hot like hell 
(often far over 40 degrees), it is tropical at the moment, 
and you nearly only can do something outside in the shadow if 
there is some wind to cool you of. But it is not such a 
stupid answer if you consider that a new telephone line cost 
2500 Dmarks and we are planning to move soon to another, 
bigger, building.

Bad we talk about their and our project and he said that he 
would be very happy if we could organise similar workcamps in 
their planned barracks as we are doing in the rest of 
Croatia, the Danish states would pay for it (maybe). We wrote 
down what we need, loudspeakers and amplifiers for camps, 
thousands of teddybears (to hold something), tons of Duplo 
from Lego, schools material, paper pampers and all those 
others stuff nobody thinks about when they think about 
refugees children. 

At the same time Marc-Jan was visiting the Consulate of the 
Netherlands, to ask if they would help to organise a short of 
working conference about what kind of cheap grassroot action 
can be undertaken by volunteers. It will probably a part of 
an international conference an working with children in 
development countries, which will be held here in Zagreb next 
month. paid by the Dutch government. When Marc-Jan talked 
with the organiser he said that the problems are about the 
same, in development countries there are also a lot of 

refugee children.

Maybe you may think that we have only war, but as you see 
also a number of international congresses are taking places 
here, planned years ago. One of the nicest things is probably 
the fact that Spaski and Fisher are playing chess at this 
moment on a nice Croatian Island for 5 Million dollars (hope 
that at least one of them come to his senses and give the 
money to some type of relief work).

Some organisation phoned me some hours ago and said that they 
only could find 3 volunteers so far, since it was such a bad 
timing, I told that I will write a letter to Milosevic asking 
if he could plan it a little better next time. We both 
laughed a while and than I told him that we will continue our 
work also through the winter. As reply he said that he could 
imagine that since the refugee problem after the second world 
war was not solved before 1959. So guys and dolls I will be 
around for a while.

Later in the afternoon after about 3 talks with all kind of 
people further, the President came around the corner, the 
nice black dog from my brother, who paid me a visit together 
with a lot of my friends, it is what I was afraid of they 
will come one after another. he will come back soon with his 
friends to start this tour around the country, but goes first 
to France to pick some grapes and earn some money. Like 
everybody they were looking for the war in Zagreb, Lylette 
told that they only saw one destroyed house on the way down 
through Hungary and therefore they are not making a d-tour. 
It will be the frustration from almost everybody who comes 
here, where is that war, what is it that makes this place so 
special.

In a couple of days I hope to move to a bigger house, tonight 
I will check out a new place to run our "operation", since it 
is clear that our Peace Center is getting far too small to 
cope will all the people which are passing by. and we also 
need a lot more computers, we are now nearly fighting which 
each other to use the two we have. I will miss Vesna's  house 
but it is better to have a place for myself from where I can 
run this madhouse. 

So in principle things are going good, everywhere around the 
world people are responding and I think that we can start to 
think that all your work has a positive effect. The children 
really like it, the mothers are feeling that somebody is 
taking care of them and we have not heard much critic yet.

With Love from ZA-mir-GREB,

Wam:-)

P.s. hope that none of you thought I gave up, but the 
harddisk from our dispatch computer in Germany is full and 
some how the like Comlink <-> APC is broke. It makes the 
world a lot smaller suddenly.



P.s. 2 Can somebody in Washington or elsewhere in the states 
find my the programme MicroArt release 1.0 by the Institute 
for Information Industry, since it is a little silly that I 
have got an A$  scanner which can't work standing here (okay 
it is programme from before the war, 1989 but it must 
available somewhere).