Who are Women in Black Belgrade?

We are feminist and pacifist group founded on October 9th 1991 in Belgrade. Dressed in black, in silence, we stand throughout the four seasons in the last nine years in the main square and protest against the Serbian regime. We are a women’s activist group against war - against militarism, nationalism, ethnic cleansing, rape of women in war, sexism and fascism.

On the streets we express our non-violent opposition to the militaristic regime and forced mobilization. We believe in right to be different. We promote the ethics of knowledge of the Other, believing that knowing the Other means already ruining the order of daily fascism. Our visible, persistent, nonviolent protest is at the same time our resistance to the regime which has taken the right to speak on behalf of the entire ":Serbian ethnic collectivity": DON`T SPEAK IN OUR NAME.

Women in Black are disloyal. Disloyal to the present state, to the language of hatred, to the bloodthirsty nationalist politics. Women in black disagreed with severe beating of people; with the politics of repressions, apartheid, massacres. Women in Black first oppose the killings done by the state from where we come from, and only then those from other states, because we consider this to be responsible political behavior of a women- citizen. Women in Black denounced that Serbian soldiers raped women in every war, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Croatia and Kosovo. Like examples of universal soldiers – they also rape women in their home. Women in Black opposed the NATO air strikes as well as ethnic cleansing in Kosov@ in 1999.

In these years, some of us fed women and children in refugee camps, schools, churches, mosques. We never stopped talking to women and men of the Other side, never stopped crossing the borders of the Balkan ethno states - because solidarity is the politics that interests us. Women in Black understand democracy as support to anti war activists, friends, sisters: Albanian, Croatian, Roma, Serbian or stateless women. Women in Black support men who refuse to go to war - deserters are our allies, with whom we, throughout these years of statemade misery, insist that there be end to the slaughter, destruction, forced migrations, rape - we take care of others while the patriots take care of themselves...

Women in Black, in the past nine years

• have published eleven books in four languages in about 35.000 copies in all.
• have organized eight international meetings of "Women’s Solidarity Against War" in Vojvodina and Montenegro with more than 1.000 women present.
• have handed out more than 50.000 leaflets about non-violent conflict resolution against war, spreading our desire for peaceful women’s culture.
• have organized more than 80 exciting Women’s Peace Traveling Workshops in 12 towns in Serbia.
• have worked with more than 350 women refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, in refugee camps.
• have published more than 100 public statements against Serbian regime making war, against war and again against war.

In this moment in which Serbian regime is pushing Montenegro in threat, launching another silent mobilization in Serbia, in the moment in which the remain Serb population in Kosovo live fear of life, and Albanian population in Kosovo are trying to overcome traumas of burned corpses and houses........

.........we are very proud that our activist Nora Ahmetaj, Woman in Black from Kosov@, represents us here in New York. Women in Black are also in New York, and everywhere, in Israel, Belgium, Italy, Spain, India, Germany, USA... We, Women in Black are loyal to sisterhood and peace, tenderness and women’s solidarity.

8th of March 2000
Belgrade