Topic: Zagreb Diary 
Response  61  of  67
 Written 12:44 AM  Jun 29, 1992 by wamkat in gn:yugo.antiwar 
Subject: Zagreb Diary

Zagreb Diary
28-06-1992

Dobre Dan,

Another Sunday went by, another Sunday without peace in these countries. Just 500 kilometre from here lays Vienna and when I would be able to travel to same amount of kilometres in the other direction I would nearly be in Greece. A country which belongs to the so-called civilised world, the European society, but still sentence people 19 months to jail just for spreading some support leaflets for Macedonia. It is unbelievable that such things can happen, without daily demonstrations in front of Greece embassies around the world. 

Croatia feels strong that is clear, the critic on UNPROFOR gets stronger by the day. When I came here UNPROFOR was the big protector, three months later more and more people openly say that if UNPROFOR can't secure the peace in their sectors they have to go, Croats can do it themselves. This opinion is not only expressed by right wing politicians by the way. It is a type of general feeling which goes straight through all parties and society wings.

For a lot of people the role of UNPROFOR is more and more unclear, what are peace keepers and why haven't they send peace makers. Try to explain why the world send only people to monitor the cease fire, when there is no cease fire to monitor. Especially when those monitors cost per day per person more than what it cost to keep app. 100 refugees alive.

When Joel arrived he told us that the last two days before he came to Zagreb he spend in Paris on a meeting of Quakers against an arms fair in that town. The business man he talk to said that it was a bad year, not much selling was done. If the countries from former Yugoslavia and the USSR weren't buying so much they would have lost a lot of money. That is not a hopeful picture for the future of these countries. 

It was not Veni, Vedi, Veci (or how the Italians say it) with Mitterand today, but at least he stayed 6 hours in Sarajevo. Ofcourse he had to be transported in an armed car and spend some time in the shelters, since attack on parts of Sarajevo continued, but he was there and that is hard to image. He flies in by helicopter and out. Thousand of people would like to do the same, at least the last part, but are not able to. It is a weird, weird war. Tonight will land the first France airplanes on Sarajevo airport with humanitarian aid. We will see, maybe this is the turn of the war, at least for Sarajevo.

In Northern Bosnia the fights continue around the highway Banja Luka to Serbia continues. Heavy shelling was reported from the Derventa area and the pictures show on television made clear that when the fights ever stop Derventa will be not more than a smoking bunch of ruins. Also shelling was again reported from the Dubrovnik and Slavonski Brod area in Croatia. So if there are still people out there who think that the war in this country has stop, forget it, it is stil there.

Tudjman is re-elected as candidate of HDZ to run for president again, during a meeting in Zagreb. The election campaign is starting, politicians scatter over the country and pop up in places where they never have been seen before. Every day we get reports that somebody held another political meeting in one of the shelters. Forgive my sepsis, but for months the politicians did if this area weren't existing. But politics are really alive in this countries, where ever the politicians are popping up hundreds of people are willing to listen to them, how dry there stories may be. Politics without the circus they often build around in in the west.

Some more sepsis I have about the big demonstration which was held today in Beograd, of course it is good to see to a few hundred thousand people demonstrated against Milosovic and his politics. But still some how this meetings has the same nationalistic radiation which makes wars happening. Let's hope it was only the interpretation of HTV, I stay in a part of Zagreb were you only can receive HTV and not Beograd television (at least not without special antennas).

Numbers of demonstrators, numbers of refugees, numbers of wounded and killed soldiers, all of them will go into the statistics of history books. Each of them are a part of the misery which is taking place in these countries. But what are those figures more then breaks on a white paper. Talk with the people who lost a relative, their son, their father, their uncle, talk with them and try to imagine what it meant for them. See what bombs can do. In three months I have seen Sarajevo change from a beautiful city into a series of total destroyed houses. In each of them families lived and now...... Who will ever be able to explain this all.

Yesterday evening Michael Jackson was on Croatian television announcing his new fund to save to children around the world. he gave a million dollars to this new fund (what is probably not more than a day work for him). We will send his fund a proposal tomorrow in the hope that that fund will help us realising some dreams for the children in the refugees camps over here. But somehow I haven't got that many hope that we will get our funds together in time.

These countries are anyway a place were you have to jump from one hope to another every day. Each time you hope and see that hope as water going through you fingers. Lucky me, I have a lot of hope.

With Love from ZA-mir-GREB,

Wam:-)

p.s. I talk with my children (Pjort and Rik) today, per telephone, we were joking about the nice whetter and the sunflowers which were growing in their garden. Next week I will visit some more refugees camps and see thousand of children which have no garden anymore, they even don't have a place for themselfs.

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