Hrvatska Sabor and a lot of tea

(Tito and the girls)

(Ksenia, Sandro, Katarina, Grace, Me, Becca, Petra, Dora, and Bepo--family and extended family)

Some people think Tudjman was good, but my host dad (well the man who is separated from my host mom but who sometimes comes into the house to drop off food/money etc), says he doesn’t like Tudjman. Jako loshe (very bad). He said that a lot of people who didn’t have a lot of money during Tito’s time like Tudjman because they have a lot (people in the country). But those who did have good jobs and money during socialism were and still are very unhappy with Tudjman. Right now, the president of Croatia is Mesic, and my host dad says that he doesn’t play such a big role in the decisions. Parliament is more important because they make the decisions, Mesic is just the international figurehead for Croatia, not very important, he says.

We talked about economics and his bar over some homemade Dalmatian wine and proscuitto. He isn’t such a bad guy, he tried to make conversation and he shared his thoughts and food with me. I do think it’s significant that he comes when Irena (my host mom) is not home. I wonder what the real issue is between them.

Today we visited the Croatian Parliament. Our tour guide was a Member of Parliament, the youngest Parliament member, AND she is a WOMAN. There are 152 members of parliament, with 21 females in all. She is the youngest and is very witty and humble (seemingly). In Croatia there are 10 electoral districts. IN each district there are 14 elected members, there are also, separate from the districts, 8 elected minorities (Serbian, Hungarian, Czech, Italian, Russian etc, who are guaranteed representation), and 4 members who are elected by Croatians living abroad.

There are more than 20 committees in Parliament which don’t play a big role in the decisions/legislation passed. This is very interesting because the woman who toured us said that it used to play more of a role but now is limited, people don’t shw up for the meetings, the meetings are general, etc. I wonder why this is.

Croatia is applying for membership to the EU. There are EU flags next to every Croatian flag on government buildings. A lot of legislation has been made to follow the guildlines of EU structure, which is very interesting indeed.

She was 21 when she was elected to Parliament. She had to work very hard for respect and attention from the other members of parliament. For a while, they would all walk out of the meetings to smoke a cigarette or have a drink when she talked, now some of them listen, soon more of them will listen. I admire her a lot. She represents, as much as she can, the voices of many of the youth of Croatia. She keeps a blog of her thoughts, gives out her cell phone number to citizens, visits people, writes her speeches, works for herself entirely (unlike US politicians), and is very motivated. I was impressed.

But she isn’t a feminist. It was surprising that she said it so straight forward in front of us all. I can’t imagine being in her position and not being a feminist. She said she believed in equal opportunity for women and men, but didn’t believe in equality for all people because “all people are different”, which sort of makes sense but doesn’t at the same time. A few of us got into a conversation afterwards over some espresso and popcorn, talking about how feminism is different here in Croatia compared to the US. Here, there aren’t many differences between people. Ethnically, there are minorities from the region (probably the furthest is Turkey). There are hardly any black people here (I think I’ve counted 6 so far). In the US, feminism is divided according to many different things, but mostly black feminists are very different than white feminists (I don’t even know if “waves” of feminism exist here, possibly a very interesting subject to research….hmm).

But speaking of research, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I should do during my Independent Research time in the area. I think I might end up traveling around, rather than sticking to one place, and researching how people, mainly teenagers/youth, understand the region’s past, specific to the wars and political changes (socialism to capitalism). I want to better understand how collective memories are created here, and how it might be different according to ethnicity/nationalism (Serb, Croat, Bosnian, Muslim, etc). What do you think?

I discovered this website… http://www.nansen-dialog.net/
. This with the combination of my interest in Dialogue back at Clark, could make for a very interesting research plan…

Your thoughts?

Love, Erica