Topic: Zagreb Diary 
** Written 12:41 AM  Jul 10, 1992 by wam.kat@zamir-zg.comlink.apc.org in gn:yugo.antiwar 
Zagreb Diary
6/7/8-07-1992

Dobar Dan,

So my computer seems to hate wars, he didn't want to work the last days and broke down a couple of times. The result was that I lost about 80 mgb of information and programmes and lost 2 whole days to get most of it back. The only thing what is missing is the software so that I can work with my scanner. That guy is now standing next to my computer, being totally unemployed. If somebody has software for him (Visa FBS 300, Image scanner) please let me know.

So now you know why you had to wait for some days before I wrote a few other pages into my almost never ending story. Another reason was that we (Eric Bachman) and me have spend the some days with getting ARK and the Centre for Peace, Nonviolence and Human Rights on line, that means building up our own BBS system, as you can see on the header of this messages it works. But not totally yet, so it is not possible to send mail from APC to our system, but that will go fast. The name of our system is Za(for)Mir(Peace)-Zg(Zagreb)

All in all that means that we will soon have a direct link with Beograd, Eric is now on his way to there and in some days from now ZaMir-Bg(Beograd) will be in the air. I hope it works, since I really like to have the latest news from Beograd and all the demonstrations there. Some days ago we received in Serbian some reports from the students actions and it seems that the situation among the students in the occupied universities is not so homogen as it shows on television. The French philosopher Bernard Levi who came to Beograd and hold a speech at one of the university against nationalism was not really the favourite of a big part of the students. They shout him out (if that is propel English).

Back to normal live in Zagreb. Prices of most of the products highered up again, it is nice to see in the shops when the price are higher again the shops owners have to re-do all the prices again. Life is not cheap at all and I am wondering how long I can survive without finding some propel income (some friends send me some money once and a while but that is by far not enough). To get a job as foreigner is for me probably easier than for these other foreigners here, people who are born in Croatia, but who have Yugoslav passports. I told some days ago how difficult it is for some people to get the Croatian nationality, even when they are born in Zagreb. A friend of mine (whose father was and probably still is officer in JNA, his father left Croatia with JNA in November last year, and my friend haven't heard anything from him or his mother since then, he even don't know where they are) found himself a nice job, but needs to continue Croatian citizenships (without it he gets send out again) and since he can't get this paper from his parents (where they were in 1947) and his nationality in officially Serbian, even he lived his whole live in Zagreb, he has a lot of talking in front of him before they make him citizen of Croatia. And as extra he can than also been called up to serve in Croatian army. In facto it would be possible that they send him to fight against JNA, his father with other words. 

This father against sons or brothers against brothers happened more often in mixed families. In Croatia Monitor (a pure propaganda weekly for UNPROFOR soldiers, published by the Croatian state, it is a collection of own written articles and articles from foreign  newspapers, all of it terrible one-sided) I found a story among all a lot of stories about massacres of two brothers from Skradin (near Sibenik), Dragan and Srdjan (both of Serbian nationality). Of course you never know if the story is true or not, but it goes that Dragan (who spend all his live in Croatia) joint the Croatian army after the war started (was and still is taken prisoner by Chetniks) and his brother Srdjan (who lived a big part of his live in Beograd) joint the Chetnik forces and came to Skradin to burn down the homes of his former Croatian neighbours. 

The virus I had in my body is nearly gone now, but I was really feeling bad for some days. So I missed a lot of visitors who passed by in Zagreb in the last weeks, sorry guys and dolls, but I was really feeling weak and not a good partner to talk to anyway. This of course made other people telling me about the special types of illnesses which appear when people have to sit for a long time in the shelters. Especially the big public shelters are a breeding place for all kind of virus. In January almost everybody in and around Zagreb must have been ill according to all the stories. Wonder how that is at this moment in Sarajevo, in some parts of the town people are already for over two months in hiding.

On television they showed a part of the town which is still totally cut off of the rest of the city (Dobrinja, almost 35.000 inhabitant) and were snippers are mastering the streets. Only very fast runners can move from one place to another in order to get food. The guy on television showed what they could get in the shops for one day (one family), two tin cans of fish conserves was all there was. The reliefs, which are now flown in about 14 times a day, couldn't get throw to that part of the town. So people are still in problems.

Bosnia Herzegovina is now divided in different parts, since Derventa has fallen under Serbian control the other day they, the Serbian leaders in BiH have declared there own Serbian Bosnia, not any longer part of BiH.  

The election in Croatian are coming closer, yesterday evening they started to make up a scheme for the broadcasting time (each party has about one hour) of the different parties on television in the coming period. I think there are over 30 parties taking part in the election and we have to see, if we want, that is, 3 hours of party promotion every evening in the near future. the way they selected when which party has got his or must I say her hour was fantastic. They made a nice show out of, inclusive such a lotto machine with small balls (on which there are numbers). So for over an hour I heard (Hrvatska)...Stranka (hope I write the word correct, Croatian for party) this and (Hrvatska).... Stranka that. 

All over the country they are now building refugees centres, most of the existing camps are running full and new small camps has to be putted up, for e.g. the new one in the middle of the town centre of Djakovo which was visited yesterday by UN representatives. All of these new camps are very improvisorical and the people in it complain a lot about missing a lot of the basic facilities. We really all have to  hope strongly that the situation in BiH will change during the summer, since it will be a mass if this goes into the winter. Without help from outside Croatia will never be able to give all this people a propel place to stay when the snow will come. And already in the autumn it will be hard to survive in those camps. In 9 days from now our first workcamp will start and we really hope that we will have enough money and volunteers to make it happens.

The rebuilding of the tram lines through Ilici, which is the main street in Zagreb,  and on the main square is still going on. And so the fact that during the rush hour ten of thousands of people have to run over a kilometer from one tram stop to another tram stop, this use to be the route of the major tramlines. According to Novi Danas the costs of the whole project are about 5,6 % of all the money which Croatian can spend to rebuild the country after the war. I wonder why they have giving this project so much priority. And it can take a while longer since the labour union has proclaimed that they will start a general strike if the minimum wages would be soon 200 Dem (around 30.000 Croatian Dinars), that is about 2 times more than now.

Also in Novi Danas, of this week,  I found a reportage about an exhibition which takes now place in Beograd, an exhibition of stolen art as Novi Danas call it.  The official name of the exhibition is however "Icon Painting of the Dalmatian Krajina". Most of the icons were "stolen" out of Croatian museums and churches in the last two years.

With Love from ZA-mir-GREB

Wam:-)

P.s. On ARK we still receive letters addressed to Zagreb, Yugoslavia (or Zagreb, Croatia, Yugoslavia) for all those people abroad, who haven't figured out yet that Croatia isn't a separate state, once more, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and last but not least Macedonia are separate states. Yugoslavia is now Serbia and Montenegro. Please if you write use the right address, Croatia on the envelope is more than enough, it will arrive.




 End of text from gn:yugo.antiwar **