By George Lakey
June 2001

The symbolism spoke clearly: 30 young adults seeking knowledge and skills to build a just and tolerant region, gathered in a Croatian town still largely in ruins from the devastation of the Balkan wars.

Each day we walked past bombed-out buildings, avoiding teetering walls that regularly put townspeople in the hospital. Institute Director Todd Waller, a Training for Change graduate, repeatedly warned against straying from the pavement: mines still lie in wait.

Nonviolence training in the ruins of Vukovar We went to Vukovar, Croatia, to work with 30 youths from around the region. Above: the city's ruined water tower. Below: the school, a detail of the school showing artillery blast, and a crew installing new street signs in the destroyed center city.

In the region around Vukovar, 80% of those who fought in the war have tried to commit suicide at least once, according to Charles Tauber, M.D., a trauma specialist who's been working there for five years. At least 15% of the population was tortured and, he believes, all have been traumatized at some point. There's a high rate of family violence and the vast majority of the population are alcoholics.

I visited the quonset huts which were the concentration camp for Vukovar. All sides in the war had concentration camps. I visited the site of a mass grave where 150 hospital patients were taken and executed because they were from the "wrong" ethnic group. While I was there an ethnic cemetery was desecrated by "the other side." Vukovar remains a segregated city, shell that it is.

The miracle of human resilience is that young people emerge from catastrophe to try something new. For example, the participants from Bosnia, Romania and Croatia were fascinated by the stories told by Serbs from Otpor, the youth movement that overthrew dictator Slobodan Milosevic last year through nonviolent action.

NATO bombing fails; nonviolent action succeeds

Not only did the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia fail to dislodge Milosevic, the participants told us; it actually lengthened his stay in government! The pro-democracy movement was growing rapidly, and then it was interrupted by the bombing which Milosevic used to rally people against a common threat. The pro-democracy forces had to wait until after the bombing ceased, leaving dead and wounded civilians, leaving hundreds of thousands of Kosovo refugees, leaving cancer-producing nuclear materials (and other toxic ecological damage), leaving industry in ruins, and leaving Milosevic in power.

Finally the movement could get back to work. Instead of allowing the immoral and illegal U.S.-NATO bombing to dump them into despair, they once again organized, this time concentrating on training tens of thousands of youths in nonviolent direct action.

Police used informers, arrests, and beatings to try to stop the movement. Otpor activists, some as young as 15, spent a total of 42,000 hours in prison in a single year to overthrow the dictator. "After Milosevic fell, I accessed my police file and learned I was on the regime's hit list," 21 year old Igor told us, recalling periods of time when his mother warned him away from coming home to another arrest or worse.

The three Otpor trainers explained to the other seminar participants the dynamics of nonviolent action and its assumptions about power. They found my article "Mass Action Since Seattle" helpful in putting their direct action experience in a wider perspective.

"What was it like," I asked 18-year-old Boyan, "when Milosevic actually fell on October 5th?" His eyes sparkled while he grinned. "I felt so high, so amazed and happy. Maybe it was like an astronaut who dreams and dreams and works every moment to get into space and then finally does--and sees the earth in a new way." He kept grinning, at a loss for more words.

Why were these Otpor trainers in Vukovar? For the same reason that four young people from Belgrade came to Philadelphia to TfC's Super-T in June: to learn more skills for building the new Yugoslavia. "We got rid of the dictator," they said, "but democracy needs much more than that. We have so much more to learn."

Most of the participants in Vukovar had specific projects to do when they got home in Bosnia, Rumania, Croatia, and Serbia: starting campaigns, building youth centers, bolstering education. We faculty members at the Institute met with each project team to coach them , and they attended workshops ranging from fundraising to avoiding burn-out. A member of the faculty team was TfC graduate Claudia Horwitz.

The Institute was sponsored by the Center for Constitutional Studies and Democratic Development, Johns Hopkins University and Italy's University of Bologna. The hope is that in addition to repeating this Institute for more young adults next year, the participants most interested in adult learning can be trained to become trainers. Already a series of workshops for trainers is planned for the coming year. The visions of Johns Hopkins and Training for Change overlap in an important way: we both want to build the capacity of local people to do their own training. With TfC's track record in Russia and Thailand of "working ourselves out of a job," we are now asked to collaborate in the Balkans as well.

Copyright © 2001 Training for Change