dc.description.abstract | In the text, the author attempts to identify the basic causes of the failure
or only partial success of Western Balkans civil society, i.e. nongovernmental
organizations as their key organizational form, in the
process of reconciliation and renewal of cooperation between recently
warring ex-Yugoslav nations. She starts from an etimological finding that
the word reconciliation in Serbian (pomirenje) is actually derived from the
word peace (mir), as a linguistic label of an inter-group relation that is
contrary to the one named war. Therefore, the stabilization and ensurance
of peace, mainly established by means of an external intervention (the
same one which in fact created a strong presumption for its violation), is
a wished-for and intended outcome of the reconciliation process among
ethnic groups that populate the Western Balkans region. However, the
historical experience, reminds the author, teaches us that it is only a just
and fair peace that is stable and long-lasting. In the ex-Yugoslav “case”,
taking into account all its causes and occasions, such justice implies a clear
and consistent definition of state-territorial borders among peoples, all of whom (except Serbian), through referendums, fragmented the state
union in which they had lived togetherfor almost eight decades. Namely,
the inter-ethnic conflicts in the region of former Yugoslavia did not
commence for the purpose of the commission of crimes, which might be
wrongly concluded through the absolutization of this, undoubtedly the
most tragic of all, its criminal dimension, which is something that the
Serbian non-governmental sector particularly insists on – the true motive
of the wars, according to the author of this text, was the conviction of
some of their internal participants of the injustice of the already existing,
“republican” borders of the new states that kept emerging on the ruins
of the SFRY, a conviction which, considering the political technology of
the secessionist fait accompli of other participants in the years-long
fragmentation and disintegration of the second Yugoslavia, was
inevitably conducive to war as a method of correcting the injustice that
had been perceived. With the tendentious, reductionist and largely
falsifying interpretation of the ex-Yugoslav case that arose on those bases
(instead of the declared humanitarian and pacifist treatment of the same),
as a self-imposed mission for which they had too few expert qualifications
and too many crypto-political and profitable motives, the “third sector”
of the Western Balkans, mainly its Serbian part, through the majority of
their activities, contributed more to the moral confusion and social
destabilization of the region and to further group-psychological
distancing of peoples inhabiting it, than to theirreconciliation understood
in the aforesaid terms, as a basis of productive cooperation and safe
progress in the region where they live. The more clearly it reflects the
unpleasant fact of their actions and the sooner it agrees to the redefinition
of their hitherto mostly misconceived mission, or to its reduction within
the declared and socially expected framework, the sooner will the local
non-governmental sector in Serbia, according to the author, start to
increase their relatively low social credibility and become a respectable
factor of a solution to the tragic and decades-long interethnic “enigma”
of the Western Balkans region. | en |