Whenever we organise a training, we always ask people to let us know if they are suddenly unable to come, so their spot doesn’t go to waste. In our experience, there are people who are willing to pack in a matter of hours and show up for the training if given the chance, which goes to show their tremendous motivation. In preparing this year’s Basic Training in Peacebuilding, there was some of both cancellations and tremendous motivation. The composition of the group changed several times until we finally all met in Ulcinj on 18 October. We received 124 applications for the training from Macedonia (14), Montenegro (13), Serbia (34), BiH (44) and Croatia (12). Twice as many women (81) applied as men (42), with one person not stating their gender. There was also one person who did not cancel, but didn’t show up for the training either. It is hard to find 10 days you can set aside for this type of training, perhaps harder still to have an employer readily give you that many days of paid leave. These are the main difficulties we’ve faced in the past years when it comes to attendance. One good thing about it is that you then end up with a very motivated group of participants.
The group was made up of 11 women and 8 men. They soon established good cohesion, to the point where we anticipated having issues if/when there was a confrontation about opposing interests or needs. It turned out that no one avoided conflict, difficulties were communicated clearly and any misunderstanding was resolved even during the breaks.
Struggles and turning points
The Basic Training in Peacebuilding consists of two parts, with a one-day-break in the middle. The first part of the training is dedicated to getting to know each other and learning the basics of teamwork, becoming aware that peacebuilding truly starts with each of us individually, but is also a collective effort. Two heads are smarter than one, and power sometimes depends on the strength of vision and not the number of people on the ground.
In this part, we also deal with prejudice and stereotypes, we learn about the multilayered nature of identities, including those people ascribe to us that we did not choose for ourselves. Or not necessarily. The beauty of working in this group was that we learned about both, but that neither were wrong, it was just a matter of understanding how an identity can be important to some people to the point where they would be willing to risk their life for it? And why is it important for someone else to be recognised as a husband or father, instead of by their ethnic identity? How are these dilemmas reflected in ourselves and the people around us? People spoke openly about their struggles and turning points. What is more, there was no difficulty in discerning the social origins of such patterns, “what would our grandmothers say”, for some of the prejudices or behaviours that lead to discrimination are received from our most immediate environment and from an early age. It was a privilege to spend time among people who were not afraid to look unsparingly at such cultural values, without the rose-tinted glasses of tradition.
We noticed some reticence initially to broach more difficult “war topics”, but from the midpoint evaluation of the training, we gathered that the participants themselves wanted to delve deeper, do more work in small groups and on the central topics of the training: dealing with the past and peacebuilding itself.
We were happy to oblige.
The average age of those who applied for the training was 37.7, almost 38. As always, when we select participants, we try to put together a group that will be reflective of the applicants as a whole. Our group included people studying social sciences and people teaching them, primarily history. Members of disabled war veterans’ associations and families of fallen fighters, war veterans from different sides, a social worker working with migrants and refugees. A lawyer and a pedagogue. Socially active artists, media workers, people devoted to their faith. These were just some of their identities, so the differences were equally distributed and dialogue had a crucial role, though that is perhaps not the best term for the kind of exchange we had among different generations. The most important thing for peace work is to cross boundaries, and not just those that are visible, administrative, that serve as national borders.
Powerful feeling when you find yourself in a safe space
CNA has a good 20-year record of producing documentary videos and films that, as we have come to understand, are important documents of their times because they feature people with different, but still painful experiences of the war and its aftermath. The documentaries tell stories of emigrating, moving away, being exiled, returning, and about important, courageous human gestures. They often serve to open up these topics at the training. Thus, for example, Intermittent Line, a documentary we showed at the training, opened up a perspective that other countries of the former Yugoslavia know little to nothing about, that of Albanian-Macedonian dialogue about conflict and future coexistence in North Macedonia. We talked about why the conflict arose, its official interpretations, and what about other interpretations? Still, the most important exchange in this discussion concerned fear, insecurity and loss of trust, things easily destroyed in war and difficult to rebuild. Just like with houses, they’re easy to destroy, but it can be so difficult to rebuild your life and your home elsewhere, even if you are “among your own people”. That was the message of the second documentary we showed called “Alien Home” about people who exchanged houses after the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed because they had become unwelcome in their old neighbourhoods. We did not expect the response to be so strong, but this documentary had a particularly strong impact on the older participants who had experienced something similar. Among us, however, were not just those who had to leave, but also those who stayed and were left without their neighbours whose house keys they were still holding on to. It is a powerful feeling when you find yourself in a safe space where you can share your pain with everyone else, without fear that your story will be a burden to someone else, as often happens when war stories are opened in everyday life. We recognise each other in these stories and feel compassion, so you get the impression that lasting peace would be made possible by allowing people to understand each other. We all know, however, that there is more to it, you have to get the chance and then be prepared to hear others and finally you might understand.
We know each other less and less
Sometimes they tell us that four trainers is too many for a group of twenty people. This was never a criticism voiced by the participants, but comes from requirements to reduce the number of paid hours as dictated by capitalism. On this occasion, in addition to Katarina Milićević (Kragujevac) and Radomir Radević (Podgorica) from CNA Belgrade and Nedžad Novalić (Zenica/Sarajevo) and Davorka Turk (Zagreb) from CNA Sarajevo, we also invited our friend Luan Imeri from Skopje (Centre for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution) to join us as part of the team of trainers. Looking back, it was absolutely the right decision. Apart from our initial motivation, Luan’s life and work experience was another area for people to learn about, many for the first time since they never before encountered the perspective of someone from North Macedonia. This meant that the number and composition of the team of trainers was able to meet the challenges coming from the group of participants in the best way possible. None of us trainers could appear in discussions often or long enough for the participants to see us as “experts in a given field” and therefore authority figures whose opinions should be emulated. This enabled the group to work with only minimal direction from our side. Becoming familiar with the contexts we come from and examining our own possibilities for action within the given frameworks is no easy task. It is difficult to deal with the practices of constructing national narrative(s) in your own society, you feel queasy just thinking about the preferred memory, those meant to be heroes, the aims of such memory policies? And the fact is that we know each other less and less, on account of post-war barriers, and we seldom have the opportunity to hear how our neighbours live and how they see us. Workshops on dealing with the past are meant to take on this task, help us understand what it is that comes off as a threat to others and is undertaken or celebrated “in our name”, and what needs to be done in our societies for others to stop seeing it as hostile? The task is complex, but not impossible, it’s important that we’re open to receiving, but also giving criticism, saying what we feel is threatening is just as important as understanding where we may be seen as threatening – the aim is not to determine which of our societies is best or worst, but how to make them all better. That such cross-border action is possible was made clear by learning about different peacebuilding practices, such as CNA’s work with war veterans. That it is possible for people who used to belong to warring armies to come together today and visit sites of massacres and official commemorations, paying their respects to all victims, was particularly resonant with the veterans in our group of participants. But also with others, because war veterans are too often seen in our societies in a mostly negative light, as those to blame for the war, as accomplices or supporters of nationalist political elites, and few are able to imagine them capable of constructive social change. However, if people who used to watch each other through crosshairs, who lost their youth and health to the war, members of their families and fellow fighters, if they are determined to build a lasting peace together, then the rest of us can have no excuse for inaction.
Nonviolent action is a vast field of activity
The training gets its name also because responses to social injustices need to be practiced, in the world we live in everything else is predetermined – who your friends and enemies are and what you’re supposed to protest against, as well as who has the privilege of relying on the rules. Nonviolent action is a vast field of activity and it is important that we managed to unpack it and free it from false assumptions, such as the one about how it’s more important to be polite than to address injustice. Or that all protest is violent. Or that nonviolence means doing nothing.
It’s hard to say what turned out to be key for mutual understanding because, despite a high level of discussion, there was also emotional exchange and it was in a sense the main catalyst for change for many of us, including the team of trainers. Many of the exercises we were able to introduce in the second part of the training were serious and demanding and would not have been out of place in a more advanced peacebuilding training. I think I’ve just described the dream scenario of any peacebuilder working with groups: to be an integral, but not the crucial part of the group you’re working with.
The environment where a training happens can also be important for its success. In a slightly remote villa in the Ulcinj Old Town, we had everything, even things we didn’t know we needed – the unobtrusive attention of the staff, all our physical, as well as social and cultural needs taken care of, this made us feel alone enough when we needed it, but also like we were an indispensable part of the wider community. This kind of cooperation goes beyond mere hospitality and we are deeply grateful to everyone at Palata Venezia for their decades-long friendship and support.
Walking around the fortifications of the Old Town and feeling at home is a unique experience. Walking along walls that have known histories much older than the ones we are trying to understand helped us open up our perspectives towards an imaginable better future. This is an inexpensive, but real and self-sustainable perspective for security – making some form of this kind of training an obligatory part of school curricula, making it a cross-border experience, making it fun, and educational, and cohesive, offering everyone a chance to see the perspectives they usually avoid.
The photo gallery can be viewed HERE