Dato: 25. juni 1999 15:52
Message from Belgrade
(fra freds- og demokrati-aktivister, som her er anonyme af hensyn til deres sikkerhed, Arne Hansen)
>Message 24 June 1999
>
>Dear friends,
>Seizure of NATO bombing relieved us here in Belgrade about the
>immediacy, but left us in a specific state of vacuum and with a great
>uncertainty about the future. We are choked by the pictures we receive
>via satellite TV dominated by horrible evidence of atrocities by
>Yugoslav militia and paramilitaries conducted in Kosovo, and withdrawal
>of YU armored vehicles with soldiers waving flags and bottles singing
>(on withdrawal !?). All combined with home TV full of congratulations
>"we won", medals to heroic generals and officers, and our dictator not
>concerned at all for being endowed for war crimes enthusiastically
>announcing the reconstruction of the country. Pleased that the
>monstrosities of the war are stopped make us concerned equally with
>retaliations, despite KFOR heavy presence, over Serbian civil population
>and Albanians in Kosovo which are called collaborators even by BBC
>commentator. After incredible bombardment, which as we envisaged didn't
>hit the regime, with bitterness we wander how one should name all of us
>who worked hard and a wit great courage, lobbying all this years, since
>summer 1991. for peace and right of voice of pluralistic multiethnic
>civil open society. We are the victims on the ground, expelled from the
>community by extremes of the regime, from the air by bombs (ecological
>and psychological impacts are catastrophic) and now international
>community imposes on us all the collective guilt and a consequent
>punishment by exclusion from any dialogue of NGO-s and academic
>contacts.
>All in all, this produces a really schizophrenic context in which we
>have to think our immediate tomorrow with no sugar in shops, no petrol
>on pumps and no money in pockets. It gets more depressing to think of
>coming summer with yet another year without any holidays and of
>approaching winter with no heating; and then what about prospects with
>status quo (lawlessness) institutions where we still earn our wages
>(read humanitarian aid), where new "patriots" are mushrooming. The first
>session of You Parliament after bombing one smells the internal
>exterminations, just proving how little the regime is hurt, but how
>disadvantaged are we, the seeds of otherness and a community which could
>generate reconciliation inside the country but more so across the
>region.
>We then listen Mr. Clinton saying "no help to Serbia until dictator is
>in power", also stressing "we are not going to get him, you Serbian
>people should see how to achieve a change". The grim realty as poor
>country is getting poorer (and Serbia is devastated economically and
>financially) the change to liberal democracy is less likely, poverty
>produces distribution of misery and the economy of rationing, and hunta
>type authoritarian dictatorship with this finale of military
>intervention.
>Of course one resists and considers the urge for a change either by free
>elections,- which means unfortunately within a framework of brainwashed
>xenophobic "patriotic" population who "have beaten NATO", without the
>free media to promote alternative (or at least to make people aware what
>happened), and without the control over ballot boxes and counting. Even
>if elections won the question is the seizure of power, as in 1996 local
>elections; the four political parties in power are actually the
>fractions of a single block, a continuation of single party system. The
>threshold of democracy has not been crossed.
>The alternative and opposition parties are slowly consolidating but in
>three blocks: All fragmented with numerous leader dominated parties and
>NGO groups, disunited, disorganized (with no real resources to travel
>within the country to promote, even to have a reasonable premises). So
>even with a great dissatisfaction of vast majority of population about
>the real economic issues (with average income of metal worker of DM 41'8
>a month, many work without any salary), the "patriotic" rhetoric like a
>drug dominates media and minds and we fear the future months.
>The alternative to this, a much more constructive and legitimized, a
>visible support of intentional community to the alternative democratic
>forces, to proved long standing civic society active NGO-s, enclaves of
>free media and alternative democracy promoting projects conceived even
>before the bombing started, and dispersed but not really ruined in these
>events.
>But in this state of vacuum with all the focus just on Kosovo, the next
>catastrophe can happen in the core of the country, we fear that this
>scenario is not enabling us "to clean ourselves own house" but rater
>that we will be swept away as well. We plea for understanding and for a
>strongly structured support.
Underskrifter er udeladt af hensyn til forfatternes sikkerhed i Serbien.(Arne Hansen)