From: wam@zamir-zg.comlink.de (Wam Kat)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia
Subject: Zagreb Diary
Date: 21 Aug 92 14:44:00 GMT
Organization: ComLink-Network Germany - For Peace Zagreb


Zagreb Diary
19-08-1992

Dobar Dan,

I wanted to have a nice quiet day today, since I hadn't been 
sleeping much the last 5 days, but as always something had to 
happen. In this case it was something good happened, one of 
friends from the Sittard office arrived and he will stay for 
a while to help me and the Center. Burkie must firstly, 
however go back to Germany to get a new passport, since they 
stool his one in Bulgaria, with all his money and his nice 
green jacket.

I met him on the stairs of the war museum, in front of the 
wing of the Mig which was shot down over Djakovo. It didn't 
want to tell him much, but of course like that guy yesterday 
I was full of what I just heard via telephone, in Brod, 
Serbian Extremist or JNA were shooting every half hour a 
refugees, to press Croatia or UNHCR to come and collect them. 
Such things I was afraid of for some days and than it starts 
to happen. Poor Burkie had to listen to a story of at least a 
hour of cynism, about all the madness of war. The chaos which 
is the real war, it are not the frontlines where the battle 
is fought, but it happens behind the frontlines.

Burkie was quiet, as always and listen, that was good because 
I needed it just to get everything away from me. After that 
we went to the Center. We jump straight into a discussion of 
to foreigners who want to go to Tuzla and were discussing the 
most easy way down there. Or joining a Muslim brigade or 
going to Split and jump on one of that transport from the red 
half moon, which night runs on the area of Tuzla.

The one who was most eager to go is an older British Marathon 
runner, who became third years ago in New York Marathon years 
ago and now wants to run a backpack with needed medicines 
into Tuzla. He did it last year as well with some medicines 
for Osijek. Okay it will give some type of relief, but 
sometimes I got the feeling that we receive all the freaks of 
the world one day. Every hero who wants to do something pass 
by and soon we can start a travel agency into BiH. Later that 
day we discussed as joke if we could train pigeons or 
elephants to run through the lines, you have to make those 
jokes, otherwise you get more than bananas.

Together with Marc-Jan, a theatre teacher from the 
Netherlands, who joined the workcamp in Savudrija and is a 
kind of rock in a crazy ocean, I worked out plans for more 
workcamps in the near future. We figured out that we need 
about 1,3 million Dmarks to work with about 60.000 children a 
day in the camps during the winter and spring of next year. 
That may not be a lot if you consider that there are over 
300.000 children in Croatia alone at this moment which went 
to the most horrible situation. And many thousands will come 
soon, when the borders with BiH will be open again, around 
Mostar around 60.000 refugees has gathered waiting for 
permission to get into Croatia, but hundred of thousands are 
on the way in BiH.


Now the northern road over Slavonski Brod is closed, due to 
shelling of Brod and the heavy fighting in the area of 
Derventa things in Dalmatia are getting more and more 
panicking. I was therefore happy when Klaus Vack called me to 
tell me that he will be able to roll in a convoy of medicines 
(around 500.000 Dmarks worth) by half way October. He also 
promised that they will take of the paying of at least a few 
hundred German volunteers for the workcamps, the papers are 
out and it seems to start rolling up there.

Very slowly the rest of ARK and the volunteers of the 
workcamps  also starts to believe that it is possible to get 
a huge project from the ground, this project I described 
maybe be small for the enormous problems these countries are 
facing, but for us it is still huge. We didn't, as ARK, 
organised anything bigger than a music festival with a few 
thousand people and suddenly we are talking about projects 
involving hundreds of volunteers. But with Burkie on my side, 
and hopefully more of them I thank we can do it. 

It is another angle from the peace work, but we think it is n 
important angle. Of course we can use up all our power at 
this moment preparing all the alternative peace conference 
which going to be organised all over Europe in the coming 
months, since it looks that every well respected organisation 
wants to organising it or her peace meeting with 
representatives from Croatia, BiH and Serbia, we on the other 
are loosing more and more believe in all that talking and see 
with our own eyes that we are kept in a madhouse, which is 
becoming more and more crazier by the day.

We start to believe that not the peace activists in these 
country are running bananas, but the activists around the 
world. They like us to go to talk with women which barely 
escape the destruction of Vukovar and lost there friends and 
husbands (beside their houses and all the had) about the 
Serbian side of the story. Can't they bloody realise that 
there is still a full scale war going on and that it takes 
ages before people come back to a point that they are able to 
discuss those things. Let them talk they way they feel now, 
with all the prejudices and other strange things. It is what 
they need now, to get it out, to get that bloody experiences 
out of the heart and minds.

Of course those stories are coloured, but they are coloured 
with the blood of their loved ones. For the time being we 
have to forget also our own prejudices and neutral thoughts 
when we talk with them. Not that we became warriors and one-
sided, that is also not so hard, since we receive enough 
people we keep us in the track. But don't make me, don't make 
anybody defend a policy they don't believe in, just to 
neutralise the prejudices in some people heads.

It is much worst in Somalia I know, I see it every day on the 
Big Blue and don't think I forget about the tensions in the 
former USSR. If you live here you think to whole world is 
only in war you know. Everybody comes and tell the bad 
stories from other places of the world, to convince me it is 

not only bad here. I know, tell me about the flowers, about 
the successes sometimes, the world can't be in flames 
everywhere. Some people offered me a holiday somewhere 
outside this countries, I am sure I need to do it soon, but 
at this moment the train has to start rolling (and I am also 
a little afraid of travelling alone, I would like to travel 
with somebody I can trust, since I will be afraid of be seen 
at as a total idiot if I start to tell what I have seen in 
the last 4 1/2 months, hope you understand what I mean).
  
With Love from ZA-mir-GREB,

Wam:-)