My First Interview

(the pictures are to remind you that I am still having fun. me and the slovenian alps, spooning party, chilling on the balcony of the SIT office for lunch with Lindsay)

For my first interview, I was lucky enough to have a conversation with two extremely inspirational, accomplished, and hard working women in Zagreb, Croatia. The first, Emina Buzkinic, is the President of Croatia Youth Network (CYN) and a member of the Center for Peace Studies. She is 23 years old and grew up in Sisak, a small city an hour away from Zagreb. The CYN is comprised of 50 organizations (soon to be 65) in Croatia, and works to promote the ideas of equality, integration, and development of standards for the quality of life for the youth population in the country. The Network revolves around 5 programs, development of national youth policy, development of local youth policy, capacity building of youth NGOs, information service and publishing, and international cooperation. The second interviewee was Vesna Kesic. Vesna Kesic is a sociologist, researcher, and a journalist. She was involved with the first feminist initiative in the former Yugoslavia and was one of the founders for an organization, The Center for Women War Victims, which worked with refugees in transition during the wars in the ‘90s. She is presently researching institutional mechanisms for gender equality in Croatia. She is trying to figure out what happened to feminism and the feminist movement and why the current state institutions dealing with gender equality do not function.

It was quite interesting to have these two women sitting in front of me. Emina, a young powerhouse in the activist world, grew up right when the wars in the ‘90s began, right when human rights were pushed to the backburner and territory, power, and corruption were melting the countries, and people, away from each other. Vesna is a part of the established activist community from the 70’s, women who worked very hard to ascertain the feminist movement in Croatia and to put gender equality on the list of things to do. Since the wars have ended, and since Croatia has become an independent entity, how have these two generations coalesced? How are the youth from Croatia learning and understanding their Yugoslav and wartime past? How are they learning about it in school, from their families, in the media? How have ideas like feminism translated to the present time? What does the youth activist movement look like and how has it been affected by the ‘90s, by socialist times, and by the transition into the country we now see? These were some of the ideas that were running through my head as I looked at these two accomplished women, listening to their words and trying to understand what exactly has been created from the days past and how it will affect what happens, and what the youth today make, in the future.

The interview itself lasted an hour, from 3 pm to 4 pm on Monday October 11, 2007. We had a conversation in one of the rooms of the School for International Training office off of Trg Bana Jelacica, Zagreb, Croatia. Vesna was running a few minutes late so Emina and I started without her. About 40 minutes into the conversation Emina had to leave for another appointment, and Vesna and I continued to talk.

Emina told me her background of how she got to the place she is right now. She grew up in Sisak, Croatia, and after living through the wars of the early ‘90s, traveling back and forth from Slovenia and France as a refugee, she attending the Helsinki school for Human Rights in 2002. “I went there and it changed my life. I was there for a week and we had discussions of education communication, team work, human rights, youth rights, women’s rights {…] this completely changed my life and I said yes, this is what I want to be”. After attending a few workshops, where a number of students would meet from Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina to talk about peace programming, the importance of communication, and what it means for them. She did a few more workshops and came to study political science in Zagreb in 2002. She was one of Vesna students here and understood that she was very interested in youth participation in the local community. In 2004 was asked to run for CYN board and was soon after the Vice President of the movement. Since then she has been working with them and is now the President. This background was very important to me, because it gave the context in which to think of Emina as a person within the feminist and youth movements from the 70’s until now. Since I had just heard small lectures from both of these women, I had many questions. We covered several topics, and one very interesting issue was how the socialist regime of Yugoslavia effected civil society today and the civil society of the ‘90s, how Emina learned about the “history” of Croatia when it was first forming, and how Croatia was represented to her during the war.

It is very difficult for me to read the books from school and to understand what happened because it doesn’t relate to what really happened. And if you hear the stories from Croatian books and then from Serbian books and Bosnian books it is very confusing. And I am still learning. I started my primary school in 1990, the first of September, I remember that. And the second grade we didn’t have any school, we had like 100 days. And then after that we were learning something that was very confusing and I hated history […] we didn’t have text books. We had classes like ‘the Serbs attacked us’. It is unbelievable. Okay we learned a lot about Egypt and Roman culture and Greek culture, but when we had history classes on Croatian recent history it was all awful it was disgusting it was all about Franjo Tudman and everything he did for Croatia.

She then went on explaining where she was during the ‘90s and how she was going from place to place and what it was like to be Muslim during the Croatian war on Bosnia. She knew something was biased and that something was wrong. “But I am sure the children that are learning the recent history now, it can’t be clear. And Documenta published this addition to the textbooks on the past and like there are some things that I never knew about, I am 23 years old, and I still don’t know the history, what happened, who did something and who didn’t do anything”.

There is an interesting dynamic between the once unified peoples of Yugoslavia (under the slogan “brotherhood and unity”), the war time when the republics split, and the post-war time when independence over one’s own history is allowed and the question of whether communication with their ex-brothers (sisters and everything in between) does or does not exist. Vesna spoke about the state’s control over what and what isn’t said. “During one period of time they [communist party] managed to impose this politics into the education system, into picking books, and so on. So this is kind of the history that they wanted to teach, this historical creationism of the history, this was intention it did not happen by chance”.

Another interesting topic we discussed was the generation gap between the emerging activist population, and the older more established activists from socialist’s times. I asked a question about this, which actually sparked Vesna to ask Emina a question, of the lack of involvement of women within the feminist movement. Emina responded by saying that today’s youth have gotten some “heritage from the socialist times” but more or ideas are new. Current organizations, like the Center for Women’s Studies and B.a.b.e (Be Active, Be Empancipated) are seen as “too strong” in their feminist agendas, or discriminatory towards men. It was interesting to listen to Vesna and Emina discuss how groups like the Center for Women’s Studies should fully allow men into their program, something they have yet to do. Both seemed to agree that it would open more avenues for activists and widen the audience of people they could work with.

The idea of “passing on the baton” to younger activists was spoken about by Emina. “The younger activist feels that they don’t have the open door that they anticipated. For example, in creating policy. If you see the women’s network, I know we have comments in the youth sector, but these are the older activists, why don’t they get us inside? I think that the women’s network […] aren’t paying attention to what young women want nowadays, and they are maybe not so open”. This was a very powerful statement that Emina spoke of. The two discussed for a while about this as Vesna was explaining how the older generations of activists are very comfortable with what they have, that after working and devoting so much of their life to the feminist movement during a time when the state controlled most everything, is a big deal. New ideas and people aren’t so welcomed because of this. And the younger feminist group, Vesna said, established themselves but didn’t do too much because they just had a lot of ideas. She was also explaining how today, a lot of young people just don’t have it in them to devote themselves to a cause, and how that is a very important part in succeeding in a movement. “These young people aren’t that ambitious, [and] you have to be ambitious if you want to do it.”. Near the end of our conversation, after Emina had left, Vesna asked me a very interesting question. She wondered if the reason why women weren’t trying to radicalize feminism as much as in the past is because the community of men around them is, well simply put, nicer.

It seems that the most prominent issue is what and how youth today are learning, and have learned, about what actually happened during the wars. There is an increasing amount of apathy among youth, or wanting to “move past” what has happened. The idea of “dealing with the past”, something that Vesna, Emina, and myself talked a lot about, I believe needs to have a balanced. It isn’t enough to move into the future, but it also isn’t enough to stay in the past. You need to understand your past, the actions, the stories, the truths, in order to move together into the future. But it’s hard for today’s youth. They grew up, depending on where they grew up, constantly in fear of the bombs and in hiding or moving from place to place. Vesna touched on this saying that there was a lot of apathy towards the past among younger people because of these horrific memories they have, that they want to think what they do about Serbs or others and not think about it further than that. I believe this is a very important theme that I need to dive into more, and see how this is different between more and less war affected areas. It probably has a lot to do with the children’s age too. People among Emina’s age range were old enough to now remember.

Another thing that really got me during this interview was that the younger activists are feeling a “closed door” from the older activists. Emina especially feels this way when facing policy changes, something that the CNY has had to work for years on changing and being heard. I want to dive into this issue more and flush out why the youth aren’t being taking seriously by the political machos, and why the older generations of activists aren’t helping them more. Vesna said it is because they worked so much for what they already have and they are comfortable with that, but how can that excuse the lack of solidarity? What can come of this?

I think that everything that was spoken about was well rounded because of who I was speaking to. I had a representative from two very different generations, working on very different projects but who both look at the same problems with different (and sometimes similar) lenses.