During the 1991-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cvijeta Novokoviæ, living in Tuzla as an internal refugee, participated in the nonviolence work the MIRamiDa (Yes to Peace) campaign of the Antiwar Campaign Croatia. (The history of the MIRamiDA effort can be pieced together from these links. Cvitjeta took part in many other antiwar campaigns; I met her online during our work on the Servis za Pisma mail delivery service.
After the 1995 Dayton Accords brought some order but not necessarily peace to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cvijeta drew on her wartime experiences to found the Centre for Culture of Peace and Nonviolence (CCPN) in 1997, which gained a staff and some initial funding by by the end of that year. Cvijeta's vision was of intergroup dialogue amongst post-Yugoslavs who had suffered psychological trauma during the war and who were otherwise surrounded by xenophobia. Several camps for young people and trainings in nonviolent dialogue for women were held over the six years of CCPN's existence.
CCPN was mainly self-funded by its staff, which was never large, and its supporters, who were too few. For a while subscribers to zamir-chat-list contributed funds to CCPN. Payment by participants in the camps and trainings, which should have offset some costs, was not possible because of the general joblessness and poverty in postwas Bosnia. By 2003 these funding difficulties made it necessary for CCPN to cease its programs.
Other programs now serve to foster reconciliation in post-Yugoslavia (For example, R.A.C.C.O.O.N's snowboard camps on Mt. Igman, Bosnia, and Sljeme, Croatia), and it may not be necessary for CCPN to re-form. But CCPN should be remembered for its work during the early difficult and dangerous post-Dayton years. I've saved CCPN's last posting here. — ed
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