** Topic: Zagreb Diary **
Response   5  of  67
** Written 10:17 PM  Apr 20, 1992 by wamkat in gn:yugo.antiwar **
Subject: Zagreb Diary

To: confH :yugo.
Subject: SZagreb Diary

Zagreb Diary

Eastern Sunday

Eastern is a celebration of hope, I had the hope this morning when I arrived at Ark that I would be a quiet day, not to much news coming from the fighting areas, so I could work some more on my Eastern Peace Plan, drawing the card and making the letters ready. But no peace in sarajevo yet, no peace in Mostar, no peace in the whole of BiH. 
Busy typing the shit in, somebody passed by, she was on the alst bus which could leave Sarajevo some days ago. Since tonight the airport is secured by the JNA, Yugoslav Army, what taht menas I don't know yet, I just recieve the first fax about it and sended it to the Islamic Society here in Zagreb to let it be translated. The other ARK activists try to celebrate Eastern and that's good, there should be some type of hope in this part of the world.

So for the x-time in this week I am sitting alone behind this Macintosh (how ever could bought such an expensive machine) and try to get my work done as good as it is possible.  But it is hard when the telphones are ringing every 5 minutes and time after time you have to explain that you are not able to talk this nice languages Croatian. 
Up to now we have recieved this week about 450 meters of faxes from Sarajevo, not all of it goes on the net, be lucky, most of it I am dispatching to groups around the world. Desperate cries for help from organisations and parties from Sarajevo to there sister groups around the planet. 
It is Eastern and all the peace groups in Europe are walking their peace marches and I sit here, not able to reach anybody, since they are not there with cries for Peace, it is a mad mad world. 
I don't know what is going on in the world, don't know if the fightings in Turkey are stopped or becoming more intensive, and in the former USSR the tentsion were high when I left, but now, I know there was an earthqauck in my home town last sunday but thats about all the news I have heard about. 
On the other hand I now street after street were the fightings take place, I hear the names of the victims and have talk with people from IA and Helsinki Watch. And many many more. Nearly my whole live is now occupied by this war, now, but also thinking about the future of this country. What can the international community do to help those people here, there as proud as me, so help should be not given like that, but as investment in a new ecological part of this world. 
All those peace, environmental and other aware organisations around the world should realize that the people can't do it here all by themselves in the future, they have to have big brother and sisters to lean on for a while. When to war is over. 
Yesterday I went to a party, nevertheless after a while the war popped up in the conversations, you simply can't go around it. Especially not when you sit in houses which have still the marks of the blackouts, the windows glue with tape against glass flying around after a blast. Or with an eastern egg in the form of a real handgranade (it was a real handgranate by the way). 
But there are good sides, in a war people also fall in love, so did I, to be honest more then ones, since I am surrounding by a bunch of very nice and grown up women, who do there best to let me feel at home. Maybe they are that way to everybody I don't know, but I like them all a lot. Thats about the last thing I thought about when I went down here. Ofcourse when you have to stay in the shelters all the time and the bombs drop on your head, people get closer to eachother, but I went to a place were that was all over, I thought, I never could imagine that the whole bloody war started over again in BiH and that we still have at least 2 republics to go. 
With the day it becomes more clear for me that the month which I would stay here is far too little, it is going to be a much longer period that I stay in this poor and wounded country (inflation today again 35%), maybe it is even going to be my new homeland, you never know. I think about building up the peace island Vis and opening a PeaceNet node for South Europe, a more symbolic place you can't find. Establishing a ecological development agancy (linking plans and ideas from here with the right groups and institutes in the west). 
I am praying that Beograd will react on our call for contact, if they refuse we are in big troubles, how can you ever stop a war if even the peace groups are not willing to talk directly with eachother. 
I am happy, I am sad, I dance in the street and fall down tired on my bed, I live very intens here, I like the improvision, I have to use my fantasy again and I don't have to follow dogmatic guidelines, I can just do what I think is right and wrong. That is a big relive, I was like a mouse in a trap the last months (years), but now I breaking out again. All that is also happening in this warzone.

So it is not all shit and misery, it is just live and war is part of it. I am really happy that I went down here. This stupid dutch guy, without money and with crazy ideas, maybe they work, maybe they won't work, but at least I have tried.

Love and Peace from Zagreb

Wam as always in a good mood

P.s. and again a fax from Sarajevo, for how long they will be able to get there material through to us ?
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