Date: Sun, 08 Nov 1992 22:18:00 CET
From: wam@zamir-zg.comlink.de
Reply-To: wam@zamir-zg.comlink.de
Distribution: world
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia
Subject: Zagreb Diary 4 November 1992
Organization: Zamir = for peace, Zagreb
Content-Length: 7276    
X-Gateway: UC xclhh [UZERCP V3.99]


Zagreb Diary
04/11/1992

Dobar Dan,

When I stood up and wanted to was me I nearly burned my face, 
somehow hot water was coming out of the cold water tap and the 
hot water tap had nearly cooking water. It couldn't be our 
house since the whole block had the problem.

The people for the work camps in Brac and Savudrija left Zagreb 
today and poor Ivana and Goga had to run the whole day around 
in order to get every thing organised for them. When we thought 
that everybody was gone we found the lugages from a Danish guy 
in the Martinovka and the guy was on his way to Brac, we hope 
to get that organised tomorrow.

Another week half gone and still most of the work which I had 
planned is not done yet. It is hard to plan work under such a 
situation, most of the time the situation plans your work. 
Often I have the feeling that you only can react on situation, 
rather then influence them in before hand. I wonder about the 
lack of flexibility of a lot of people under stress, we as 
small group, walking on the age of our possibilities, sometimes 
are very hard for each other. What has priorities and what is 
most needed to be done.

Should we try to get those stupid blankets from the UK over 
here, that costs us time and money. And that time and money we 
can spend on building up our network in the refugee camps and 
centres. And above all we don't know if those blankets really 
exist and what colour they have. If they are grey or army green 
they can't be send to BiH, since some fighting groups may see 
the refugees for soldiers in their blankets and start to shoot 
on them. And so the world turns around us, who can decided what 
in our group. We can make decision about it, but the reality 
makes us changing it, since if a truck with aid stands for the 
door we can't send it back, it has to be unloaded and that 
costs time and space.

After months playing, fighting with all those things, 
improvising step after step, knowing that ones it will go 
better. Once UNHCR or IRC (International Red Cross) will 
recognise our work and help us with more appropriate sums of 
money, we have to use our energy to keep on going. We get cars 
for free from abroad, but for every bloody car we have to fight 
for days with the burocraty to get the thing into the country, 
but we just can't get them otherwise and we need them.

I see which sentences I have learned over the months that I was 
here, "Nema problema" (No Problems), "Nema nista" (I have got 
nothing or something like that), "Dobre" (good), "Pet minuta" 
(5 minutes) and even "Ne pucaj" (Don't shoot). Everything takes 
time, every move, every step, don't worry I am not desperate, 
it is only needed once and a while to tell you that not every 
thing is gold, what we see around. And that is often hard to 
explain to all this good people who like to give good advises 
and who wants to help. It is not that easy as it may look like.
  
Panic survived today, some days ago, people in the Serbian 
parliament want to get him out of his position, but today at 
the voting in he survived the motion against him with 3 votes. 
They, the Serbian party, accused him from hurting the Serbian 
national interest. Interesting to know was the position of the 
Montenegrian representatives during this voting, it looks that 

the politicians in Montenegro are more and more supporting 
Panic and who knows his way maybe will lead to a real break 
through in this conflicts.

Who ever would have thought that this puppet of Milosevic, as I 
described him months ago, would become a major player in this 
drama. Panic who made his capital with illegal activities in 
the USA, tax crimes and bringing medical on the market which 
weren't tested is busy to change the reality in these 
countries.

Of course the reality in BiH is not peaceful yet, Serbian or 
rather Yugoslavian fighter planes are still violating the non-
flight zone and yesterday over 3000 shells fell on Sarajevo 
(what week of triangulity of UNICEF). Still 20.000 people are 
trapped in Olova, in north east BiH, already for 3 months 
without any supplies, they are running out of everything.

Another 20.000 arrived in the last days from Jajce in Tvarnik, 
most of them already left the city again. 11 buses and a 
caravan of private cars, people by foot arrived in Ljubuski, 
about 14 kilometre east of Ploce in Dalamatia, another 4.000 
are standing at the BiH-Croatian border in Posusje. They all 
travelled over 150 kilometre through BiH to get there and are 
now held at the border. Croatia don't want to let them in, 
Tudjman again explain to the foreign press that it is 
impossible for this country to take more people. And when you 
look at the reality it is not unclear why. If f.e. Croatia was 
the USA, there would have been over 30.000.000 refugees in the 
country by now.

Back to the normal life in Zagreb, with over 100.000 refugees 
in the city and all the people back from holidays and the 
thousands and thousands of foreigners, working for UNPROFOR, 
embassies, journalist, and humanitarian organisation, the city 
is overloaded. The trams are overcrowded even outside the rush 
hours. And the situation only can get worst, especially when 
the oil prices will get hired up again and more people will 
loose the possibility to run around in cars.

This evening somebody from SDK, the state office who controls 
all the financial transactions in this country came by to give 
a small seminar about the rights and duties we have as 
humanitarian organisation. He admitted that rules are changing 
every day and that it is hard to say what will happen tomorrow. 
Also that the state knows that some humanitarian organisations 
are fake and basically working as white washers for illegal 
money. However they don't know which organisations there are, 
since there so much of them. But we are sure that we have to be 
more and more careful with our money coming in, the rules for 
humanitarian organisation will get more strict and in the near 
future they will start to control all of us.   

As they are doing already in the different refugee camps and 
centres, after the wild spread rumours of illegal use of 
humanitarian aid the state has started to control the 
administration of the camps and centres. It is a mad world that 
you can't trust the other just like that. If that type of 
paranoid feeling gets influences by the war or if it is just a 
good rational feeling, which should be always there is not 
clear to me. What I know, however that it often influence our 
way of decision making. Again a good reason to clarify your 
mind every day in order to be sure that your are realising what 
you are doing and why we are doing it.


With Love from ZA-mir-GREB,

                            Wam :-)

--------------------------------------------------------------
Zagreb Diary can be found on a lot of different computer 
Networks. If you can port it to another, please do. It has no 
copyright and may be used in all forms of further distribution 
among all types of media. But please if you use something drop 
me a line. You can reach me via wam@zamir-zg.comlink.de. I 
dedicate Zagreb Diary to Tyche, Pjort and Rik in order that 
they will know what their father was doing all that time in 
Zagreb.