A Call for Action
WOMEN IN BLACK AGAINST WAR
They have been ceaselessly killing, torturing, and raping for two and a half years already. They have banished more than 3 million lives. They manipulate women. They blackmail men. They spread hate, destruction, and death. We are left without words to express our horror and anger.
They haven't stopped yet.
Fascist leaders of Serbian policies threaten us with war in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Serbia. Meanwhile, they have stopped all electricity, water, and telephone systems in Bosnia and Herzegovina. People die by the minute. No matter which names they have, they die of the cold, illness, and hunger. And it is only November.
Fascist leaders of Serbian politics continue to destroy all positive in-terethnic communications. They have separated streets, classrooms, families, and cities. They are drawing lines on mountains and corridors through the countryside.
Since 9 October Women in Black Against War has come out every Wednesday on the streets to express its absolute disapproval of all nationalist politics. Above all, Women in Black accuses the fascist Serbian regime of being responsible for the death and destruction. According to their ideology, not a single life has value, not a thousand lives, not 1 million, not 3 million and counting. In the end it doesn't matter if they are Serbian or not.
Since their bullets and the cold will wipe out another one hundred thousand people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, since men will rape thousands of women of every nationality, since war is possible in Belgrade and anywhere—Women in Black calls all women for all types of civil disobedience.
The misery in which we live should not frighten us but incite us to resistance. It is strange that we have not yet started to scream. Our friends from Sarajevo, Bihac, Mostar, sit every day in darkness and cold without any hope. If we ever see them again, they will be difficult to recognize: Their hair has gone white, they are thinner, and they have aged in this short time. Refusing to know how they live and refusing to confront the government that tortures people are crimes.
Croatia
The section on Croatia begins with an interview with Neva Tolle, "For Women, About Women, by Women," in which she speaks of her awakening to feminism and women's projects through her own life experience. Her words speak for so many women in their experience with violence and women's solidarity, through which so many feminist activists come to know and work in women's projects around the world.
Martina Belie continues, in "The Center for Women War Survivors," by speaking about the center and its effect on her life, the life of the activists involved, and the lives of the women refugees they are reaching out to daily.
In "Confessions of a 'Yugp-Nostalgic' Witch," Vesna Kesic pokes fun at the media's reaction to feminism in Croatia by telling us her story as a feminist journalist approaching feminism. She also describes the media's treatment of feminists and the difficulties in growing up as a "witch" in Yugoslavia.
Aida Bagic, Mica Desnica, and Durda Knezevic introduce Women's In-foteka (a women's information and documentation center) and its publication Bread and Roses in two essays, "Bread and Roses," and "Something Unexpected." They talk about the access to information and women's right to know as a new principle whose "time has come,"
In "The Lesbian Question," Andrea Spehar tracks the recent history of women's progressive movements in Yugoslavia and how they have influenced lesbian organizing in Croatia. She describes the difficulties of organizing, the marginal existence to which lesbians are consigned, the discrimination to which they are subjected, and the efforts of the first organization of lesbians and gay men in Croatia to reverse all these.
ÍÄ7