Women in black against war meet

Off Our Backs, Oct 1995 by Carola, Elizabeth

women in black against war meet

Over Hiroshima-day weekend, August 3-7, 1995, the feminist anti-war network Women in Black held their fourth annual conference. Planned to coincide with the bombing of Hiroshima, the annual Zena za Mir (Women for Peace) conference since 1992 has brought together feminists and women peace activists from all over former Yugoslavia, East/Western Europe, and North America. It has helped bring together hundreds of women -- activists, refugees, feminists, delegates from a whole range of organizations, refugee camps, and regions. Here they share information, support, debate, solidarity...and just connect. Given the conditions women live (and organize) under in the fractured and traumatized regions of former Yugoslavia (some devastated, none unaffected by four years of war), this conference provides an important forum.

I was lucky to be able to go this year. Until now my involvement was peripheral, mainly through "Busking (street music) for Bosnia" (surprisingly successful!) and selling socks for aid organizations like Women's Aid to Former Yugoslavia, England (WATFY). But being there brings home the effects of the war in a way that no received knowledge, or activity, can.

walls around Serbia

Even the process of getting into Serbia is instructive. Apparently President Milosevic has wanted to keep up a veneer of democratic normality, but you need a specific letter of invitation to get a visa and still, embassy officials (at least in London) remain suspicious. Why do you want to come here? What will you be doing? Where are you going afterwards?

Militia swarm onto the train at the Hungarian border, pushing through carriage corridors, demanding passports, instantly, right now. Some of their faces, walled steel, are unreal. The violence of their presence speaks volumes about just what they've been doing on the front line.

women = peace core

Women form the core of the peace movement in former Yugoslavia. Although mixed anti-war groups and refugee projects exist (many providing support for young men -- some estimate as many as 10 percent -- wanting to avoid military conscription) many of the organizing, demonstrating, aid projects and refugee initiatives seem to come from women's groups.

The women's movement in post-communist Yugoslavia was starting to flower before the war anyway, but the war seems to have had the entirely unexpected consequence of bringing the movement together.

Projects like the Centre for Women War Survivors, Rosa Kuca and Babel (Budu aktivna, Buda emancipirana! -- Serbo-Croat for "Be active, be emancipated") in Zagreb, Medica Zenica in Bosnia, and the Autonomous Women's Centre, SOS Hotline, Centre for Girls and Women in Black in Belgrade -- all campaign, organize, provide advice, therapy, and support for war-traumatized and displaced women. Most women's projects are explicitly anti-nationalist, anti-militarist, and strongly feminist (though there are some exceptions). Most work hard to keep the lines of communication open.

Many are attempting to get themselves onto E-mail and the Internet as fast as they can. Particularly in cut-off cities like Sarajevo, this has been crucial to groups' and individuals' survival.

Belgrade Women in Black alone is a furnace of activity, organizing their weekly vigils in central Belgrade, annual conferences, publishing books and papers on women, feminism, and militarism at a rate of knots! Organizing writing and knitting projects in the refugee camps, helping and advising individual women and families...

This August's conference began at a pivotal time, just as the Croation army had taken and "ethnically cleansed" the Krajina in southwest Croatia, a community since the 1600s of "diaspora" Serbs. That day, as women gathered in the beautiful, peaceful village near the Hungarian border, 300,000 people were being forced from their homes and farms and herded along the roads -- in their cars, on foot, with their animals -- to Serbia. Many had to give the militia their life's savings to "be allowed" to leave safely. This reality was hard to feel -- at first -- as we gathered under the trees by the village's ecumenical, pro-peace church.

But the conflict 200 miles away seemed to be embodied in all the problems women had had in physically getting to the conference. A busload of Italian women had been repeatedly turned away from the Serbian border, their visas rejected and cancelled. The Croatian and British women traveling with them had to separate from them and enter "camouflaged" in ones and twos. Women expected on various trains from Budapest and Croatia had never materialized.

Eventually, women from Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, Israel, Germany, Britain, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States, Poland, and Hungary introduced themselves. Women from lesbian, pacifist, feminist, community, church anarchist, and moderate organizations came. Women shared news of their groups and projects and -- big source of cheer -- successes with getting into E-mail and the Internet.