** Topic: WAM-KAT-DILEMAS ** Response 1 of 2 ** Written 3:35 PM Jun 3, 1992 by wamkat in gn:yugo.antiwar ** Zagreb, Wednesday, 3 June 1992 Dear Marko, Email Lot's of questions, lot's of remarks. Let's start first with something about Email. I recieve per day, beside the material in Yugo.AntiWar and some other related conferences (which have nothing to do specially with former Yugoslavia, but everything with some of the topics we are facing here) app. 10-15 messages a day, from which most are rather substantial. I admit you don't see them and that is hard. But in the last 2 months, a network from friends, activists and helpers is build around the world, which are communicating basically by Email (not only on APC, but on a number of nets, thanks to some people who play active an active role as HUB and get the information from one system to another). And when I have to send f.i. a fax to a 100 people (who are NOT on a net or NOT so active on the net I have my friends abroad doing it for me). Further more we found funds and other help for our group in Zagreb (and others), organised workcamps, get Ibrahims and Nadas messages on the right places, get material translated, etc.. Ofcourse I recognise your feeling from being on an island. Sometimes I really have to shout out to get response, but it always comes, from the most extra ordinary places, just from were you don't expect it. And Joel from the states provides me with all the UN documents I want, he is really doing a hard job to collect them and get them over here. They are not always in the public part that I know. I also know that it is better that not everything what happens on the f.i. public universities nets is on APC. You would wonder how the fights in words continue in bits and bytes (I don't have to tell you, you have had that experience on Adria Net in f.i. the conference Help.Serbia) But know and realise that you and me are not the only ones on the net who spend daily many hours reading and writing about the situation in former Yugoslavia. About my Diary You know I have been here now for precisely 2 months, I started my Diary to inform my friends back home what I was doing and what was live all about here. Important for you is to realise that I am a westerner, even when I will stay here many many of yours and totally adopt the languages as my own I always will be a westerner. Like my USAmerican friends in the Netherlands, they always will stay USAmericans. Being a westerner means that some things really wonder me, things which maybe normal to you, but not to people abroad, at least not to me when I would be abroad. You have been brought up in this culture and I am just trying to find out what it makes it the way it is. It was never my intention to write as a reporter, it was my intention to give this war a face, a personal touch. To write about the daily live in Zagreb, the tell about the doubts and feelings we have. The way we operate and live our lives. And ofcourse it would help if people sit down and translate better, but they first of all not always have the time and secondly and that's more significant are not use to it. They are in fact surprised when I ask them to give a little more background information, besides the word to word translations. "Don't you understand, that is obvious, it has been that way for over 40 years". No often I don't know and does a lot of people around the globe. Peace making, peace talking, peace being, it has a lot to do with feelings, read f.i. the book "Being Peace" from Thich Nhat Hanh, a buddish monk from Vietnam. It is one of the strongest document against the total madness of violence you can imagine and absolutely not scientific. Look, Marko and other, if you want to have facts, figures, and other stuff, please just ask, I am willing to put the whole Centre up side down to get it for you. And when it is important I will find myself a translator, maybe I just have to pay one. The problem is however that I really have to squeeze it out you know. It is there I know, but it is like that book on the destruction of the environment in Croatia, I has been laying there in Croatia for months and nobody saw how many dynamite in contained. It is a learning experience, working international and knowing what is important to send out. Funny thing is that other people (mostly westerners) write me just the uppersite from what you were saying, please stay your self and write about what you see, I will do what I thing is right at the moment that I climb behind my computer the right MY diary. My feeling, my reflex on what I see, hear, and understand. Beside writing my diary I spend hours finding answers on questions (directly putted to me) about the situation here, which are more substantial and a lot shorter. But they go person to person. Ofcourse it is needed that better and more detailed information, when possible verified comes out of this office in Zagreb, but that is depending a lot of the other ARKers. Back to your first point I am not giving up using my fantasy and inspiring other people to use their. First of all I think you should go to Peace Activists to stop a genocide, maybe not the one now in Bosnia, but surely the one which will exploded after a couple of years, when the international community gets their hands of the area. Then you will see the timebomb ticking again, as it has been ticking for the last 45 years. Yes I think Peace Activists should use their brains, since it is not the first and surely not the last war were we have been too late, to say it that way. Peace proposals by the way don't necessary have to be the ones you wrote, about the big peace, it can be very simple thoughts about how to bring groups together again, not all of Peace work is high level politics. The ideas can be like dropping 5 million peace activist over Sarajevo or hi-jack a helicopter from an army somewhere and drop chicken over Sarajevo and Bread. You may think it is crazy and it is, but so is war. You may think it is dangerous, but so is war. You may think the world wouldn't pay for it, but they will pay for military intervention (and ask yourself what have they spend in the Gulf war, more then enough to make a airbridge to Sarajevo I think). And for the rest of the things I am not a peace activists, that is just a normal human reaction, ofcourse I do social and humanitarian work and ofcourse I am solidair and above all ofcourse I think independently, otherwise I never would have been here. I spend more time figuring out how to organise workcamps with f.i. the refugees then thinking about peace solutions, but that is logical I think, who wouldn't do it that way. And I give not a damned about analyses on paper if I see the boots marching through the streets or hear cockney English behind me when I sit in the pub and see that three skinheads in Croatian uniform tell jokes about west indians in London. When I was teaching on the University I send my students in the trams and ask them just to observe daily life. Your conclusion I share completely. And for the record I woke up at 7.30 this morning, putted my computer on and started work, had breakfast at 12.oo, dispatch the resolutions from Vienna to the local press and so on. No kidding I like you, but please Marko, don't give up. We have the brains and the fantasy, use it. The boys will come when the time is ripe. But they will again miss the point in Kosovo. Love and PEACE from Zagreb, Wam --------------------------------------------------------------- This message comes from Wam at the Anti War Campaign in Zagreb You can reach me via e-mail WamKat@gn.apc.org or ARK@gn.apc.org or via fax: +38-41-271143 or if your are lucky per phone +38-41-422495 or by snailmail: ARK, Tkalciceva 38/II, Zagreb, Croatia -------------------------------------------------------------- ** End of text from gn:yugo.antiwar **