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)