Essays

Course Participant: Renata Ćuk (Zagreb, Croatia)

Introduction

Many people connect war time sexual violence to the images of the raped Bosnian (Muslim) women that appeared in the news all over the world back in the 1992. Even though sexual violence against women in war times is not a specificity of the armed conflict in ex-Yugoslavia it is exactly this conflict that has brought the issue out in the open. Due to the pressures of the feminists sexual violence against women in wartime became an important issue and more important, it became punishable 1. So, the space for the issue of sexual violence in armed conflicts was definitely created. However, some forms of sexual violence were left invisible, including sexual violence against men. It is interesting to see how little research has been done on this topic.

Course participant: Irena Avirovic, Skopje, Macedonia

Collective Memory of the Greek Civil War: The Case of the Refugee Children

As a result of the Greek Civil War of 1946-49, which saw both Macedonian and Greek Communists fighting alongside against the radical right wing in Greece, thousands of ethnic Macedonians were prosecuted or forced to leave the country. Among the refugees, whose number has been contested over the years, there were approximately 28.000 children (i) commonly known as the Refugee Children (Decata Begalci in Macedonian language). During 1948, the partisans helped the systematic evacuation of thousands of children from their native villages in Northern Greece; they were separated from their parents and transported to People’s Republic of Macedonia or Eastern Bloc countries, accompanied by young women, the so-called mothers. (ii)  It is the collective memory of the Refugee Children which I will try to examine in this essay in reference with the course attended and the case studies elaborated: the mnemonic memory in Israel, memory and denial in Srebrenica and memory and amnesia of the Spanish Civil War.

In the attempt of mapping the time (iii) of what happened to the ethnic Macedonian Refugee Children after the Greek Civil War, according to their collective memory, we would outline the following milestones:

Course participant: Sakibe Jashari, Kosovo

Introduction

Initiative on establishing Regional Commission on Truth telling – RECOM

The armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia started in early 1991 in Slovenia expanding to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and completing with Macedonia. As in every post conflict situation, the number of human losses was huge in all areas of conflict. People talked about the crimes committed on all sides making labels on bases of ethnicity. All of them were inclined to accuse each other or to victimize themselves. In between of all this completion over victimization, the victims were left aside with a total number of some 16,000 missing persons in the whole former Yugoslavia.

The Regional Commission on Truth Telling -ReCom [i]was launched as an initiative in May 2008 in Podgorica with the objective to set up a public platform for victims and civil society in order to deliberate about the crimes committed in former Yugoslavia and how to develop the ReCom initiative as model were people and countries of the region would join the initiative. The core objective of ReCom is to establish the facts about war crimes and serious human rights violations committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, covering the timeline from January 1, 1991 until December 31, 2001.