** Topic: Zagreb Diary **
Response  23  of  67
** Written  1:13 PM  May 12, 1992 by wamkat in gn:yugo.antiwar **
Subject: Zagreb Diary

Zagreb Diary
11 May

Those people who are reading this diary every day or at least follow it know that I wrote that Zagreb is getting cleaned up. And they are really planning to get the area clean before the summer it seems. Since a couple of days it is a public secret that the police have given an ultimatum towards the HOS soldiers, they have to leave the building of the artists society before next Wednesday. Lot of people are speculating that that won't go without some violence. On the other the story of yesterday showed that most police agents openly are friends with this bunch of NAZIs. As there is a great support among most of the common people. Paraga is the hero of the common people, he dares to say what others think.

According to the stories HOS (which is a political party by the way and this stormtroopers are like the SS of the NAZI party, they have one member in parliament (a decedent from HDZ (the governmental alliance from Tudjman), but many more HDZ parliamentarians are secretly supporting HOS)) has build up a large arsenal of arms in the building and most of them have been on the front. If violence will be used it can come to a real shoot out. I wonder if the town (the government) will let it come so far. 

Anyway there is a good possibility that Zagreb will be in the main news all over the world at Wednesday evening, we shall see. Maybe nothing will happen.

They not have to turn in their arms by the way, so the whole clean up is just a cosmetic change. Like they have removed the office for citizenship to Novi Zagreb. Out of the eye of the general public. So many things will happen this week. Especially around the 15th of May and the days afterwards.

UNPROFOR will take over the control in eastern Slavonia, JNA will remove all soldiers from new Yugoslavia out of Croatia and BiH and the marines will take VIS by force if JNA will not leave the island by the 15th. Etc. etc.

Today a woman from Beograd was in Zagreb, she showed a video from a killing of 20 Serbs in Croatia in a little village in Eastern Slavonia. I wasn't there, but Vesna J. was rather impressed by it. They killed the Serbs, but them on a pile and tried to burn the bodies. This film was shown on Serbian television a few times. This killing was described in the report of Helsinki Watch, but their it only stood so and so many Serbs were killed in that and that village, it makes a hell of a different to know who people are killed and to see it. Ofcourse similar films are shown here, how Chetniks kills Muslims, and all that showing of those war crimes is not particularly speeding up the peace process and the bringing back together of the different nationalities. Sometimes I thing it would be much better if they show films how Serbs, Muslims and Croats were doing things together, like in the earlier days. These films shown now makes your heart bleeding and asking yourself over and over again is it really possible to ever overcome the gaps in this country in the future.

An other thing what can be said about this war is that I am still convinced that it would have been a bigger disaster if the so-called civilized country would have been part of the game. How the international forces acted in Kuwait and Iraq couldn't be called civilized. Only nearly none of this soldiers ever came in eye contact with his "enemy". The pilots in their tornados and F-16s were playing more or less the same video game as you can buy to run on a PC. It is the high technocratic war, in which bodies are not anymore counted in the hundreds, but often in the tens of thousands, were no soldier ever will see what he or she really did. That's the civilized war.

It is not easy being here the only foreigner, I hope that many would come earlier, I know they will come, but for the time being so many people lean on me. Now I am going to Vis, at least that was planned, but people in Zagreb are getting the feeling that I leave them behind and that I should stay here. It is hard to be in the middle of those discussion, not really knowing what would be the best place to help. But we will see.

I helped the Islamic Center for some days to repair there faxmachines, now the war is coming back even in my sleeping room, were my computer is now standing and receiving faxes directly from Sarajevo and other places, unfortunately I haven't found the time to type them all into the net and since we are changing our office neither have the other once.

Through electronic mail we also found out that there are many more groups of Serbs and Croats active around the globe than we know here in Zagreb, especially in the states. It would be fine if somebody could make an addresslist for us from all those groups. Thank you in before hand.

My angriness from a few days ago is over, thanks to the help of you out there on the net, some of you really helped me a lot getting my mood back. But I can tell you it is bloody hard sometimes to realize how far people can drift away from things which really matters, so often small things can break us and we except so easily the big things, the cruelty of war, the nearly standard messages about what is going on. When I see this fighting on the nets I think Jesus I am so little, so unexperienced, what can I do, I can take my bag and go home and leave this all behind and don't feel guilty anymore, I have done my share.

Why do I have to stay up night and day, why am I busy with refugees, helping groups fundraising, dispatching messages, etc.. Why me and why are the big organizations so enormous slow and burocratic. What is the matter with them, can't they see what is going on.

Why do we have to convince German peace groups to send us help (financially), why they are reacting that they see no point of sending more money, since the peace groups are not able to do anything with it. The German sended money and the war became bigger. Don't blame that on the peacegroups, the war machinery just got a little bit more money (a little bit is a huge understatement). When representatives from Paraga were in Germany they gather within a few days over 300.000 dm for their fighting machine, the representatives from the Peace groups from zagreb and Beograd had to be happy with only 10.000 dm, that's makes a different.

Ofcourse Peace or no peace is not a question of money, but it is a question how willing the rest of the world is to stop this war and stop the suffering of the civilians. If you see in the UNPROFOR reports that one of the biggest problems they have is financing the whole operation and if you hear the screams for help from the UNHR you get sad, are they really wanting to help this country or are they just pretending.

Still Love and Peace from zagreb

Wam:-)

 ** End of text from gn:yugo.antiwar **