slovo, Vol. 23 No.

2, Autumn, 2011, 95113

In a Crevice Between Gender and Nation: Croatian and Serbian Women in 1990s Anti-War Activism
Bojan Bilic
School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

This paper draws upon a variety of empirical sources to trace the dynamics of womens anti-war engagement in Serbia and Croatia from the earliest instances of mother protesting to the feminist organizations still surviving in these two countries. It contributes to the ever-expanding corpus of sociological scholarship attempting to recover (post-)Yugoslav anti-war and pacist contention that has been largely neglected in recent studies of the wars of Yugoslav succession. Rather than expounding on the ontogenesis of individual civic enterprises, this paper looks at the complex geometry of social, political and emotional co-operations and resistances reective of long term trends of womens civic organizing in the (post-)Yugoslav space. It argues that in spite of their sustained efforts to maintain communication throughout the armed conict, Serbian and Croatian women activists could not entirely evade the detrimental force of the broader social trajectories of intolerance, exclusion and separation.

... We walk across the earth Out of lines When we see each other We know we are together When we think of each other Miles far from together Remembering our dreams and goals The wholeness Despite lines and sides Senseless war We are not alone Imagine Out of lines

School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2011

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These are the last verses of the poem Crossing the Lines (Prelazei liniju) written by the Croatian sociologist and prominent pacist activist Biljana Kai in 1994, during a watch at the Anti-War Campaign of Croatia.1 If taken out of the immediate historical context of its production, this poem carries a universally applicable message of the human desire to resist the senselessness of war, bridge articially created boundaries and alleviate the feelings of isolation and fear. However, at the moment of their creation these lines had a very concrete recipient; they were supposed to travel across the severed telephone channels and over the destroyed cities of Croatia and Bosnia to reach Biljanas friends in Belgrade at the other side of the frontline. They were a testimony to the need of these women to step out of the suffocating atmosphere of their newly created nation-states and prevent further unravelling of that intricate social tissue which had connected them for decades. In contrast to the myopic policies of their patriarchal national leaderships, these women knew that their subdued instances of communication were a pledge of normal co-existence in the post-war period. This paper draws upon a variety of empirical sources (in-depth interviews, dissertations, radio programme transcripts, newspaper articles) to trace the history of anti-war women engagement in Serbia and Croatia from the earliest instances of mother protesting to the still surviving feminist organizations in these two countries.2 It contributes to the constantly expanding corpus of sociological scholarship that is attempting to recover (post-)Yugoslav anti-war and pacist contention; an area that has largely been neglected in recent studies of the wars of Yugoslav succession.3 Western social science research on the Yugoslav conicts has been rather slowly moving beyond the limits of the pervasive nationalism paradigm. Nationalism as the principal explanation for the regions long-term political and social ills has left little space for a sustained academic engagement with anti-nationalist, anti-war and pacist enterprises. Therefore, an illumination of Yugoslav anti-war activism diversies the Yugoslav political scene and creates a crack in the monolith of various (post)Yugoslav nationalisms. It renes the nationalism argument by pointing to the fact that nationalisms do not develop in isolation, but exist in a discursive trans-national eld of tensions and mutually perpetuating forces. I depart from the premise that (post)Yugoslav civic contention cannot be properly theorized within a nation-state framework that does not appreciate important legacies of Yugoslav socialism. Even anti-nationalistically oriented activists and scholars have rarely (if ever) moved away from the strictly nationally-bounded spheres which cannot do justice to a plethora of civic interactions in the (post-)Yugoslav space.4
1 2 3

Lina Vukovi and Zorica Trifunovi, The Womens Side of War (Belgrade: ene u crnom, 2008), p. 389. If not otherwise indicated, all translations from the Serbo-Croatian and Italian are mine. Ana Devi, Anti-War Initiatives and the Un-making of Civic Identities in the Former Yugoslav Republics, Journal of Historical Sociology, 10 (1997), 127156; Stef Jansen, Antinacionalizam: Etnograja otpora u Beogradu i Zagrebu (Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek, 2003); Bojan Bili, Bourdieu and social movement theories: some preliminary remarks on a possible conceptual cross-fertilization in the context of Yugoslav anti-war activism, Sociologija, 52 (2010), 377398; Orli Fridman, Alternative Voices: Serbias Anti-War Activism, 19912004 (unpublished doctoral thesis, George Mason University, 2006); Sran Dvornik, Akteri bez drutva [Actors without society] (Zagreb: Fraktura i Heinrich Boell Stiftung, 2009). e.g., Donna Hughes, Lepa Mlaenovi and Zorica Mrevi, Feminist resistance in Serbia, European Journal of Women Studies, 2 (1995), 509532; Marina Blagojevi, Ka vidljivoj enskoj istoriji: enski pokret u Beogradu 90-ih, (Belgrade: Centar za enske studije, 1998); See Maja Kora, Linking arms: War and women organizing in post-Yugoslav states (Uppsala: Life & Peace Institute, 1998) for an exception.

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This paper does not expound on the ontogenesis of individual civic enterprises or on their developmental pathways. Rather, it is interested in the broader geometry of social, political, and emotional cooperations and resistances reective of long-term trends of women civic organizing in the (post-) Yugoslav space. Yugoslav feminist anti-war activists drew upon the long history of feminist organizing in Yugoslavia to articulate their anti-war attitudes as political choices. They rmly rejected the roles assigned to them by their re-patriarchalized societies whose political elites wanted to cancel the emancipatory achievements of Yugoslav socialist rule. Before discussing Serbian and Croatian feminist anti-war engagement, I take a closer look at the mothers movement, the rst occurrence of anti-war protesting, which unfolded at the very beginning of the Yugoslav armed conict. This initiative demonstrates that women civic organizing surrounding the wars of Yugoslav succession was often a painful and perplexing process which could not evade the detrimental force of the broader social trajectories of intolerance, exclusion, and separation. The hitherto unknown and hardly predictable circumstances in which Yugoslav women found themselves managed to destabilize the profound ideological and emotional linkages that had been forged for years across the Yugoslav space. The war and the differing positions of women in it threatened long-term friendships and introduced new divisive lines within the sphere of Yugoslav women organizing which also persisted in the post-war period.

The mothers protest

The rst open expression of anti-war sentiment on Yugoslav territory was a protest by the mothers of children who were serving in the Yugoslav Peoples Army towards the beginning of the armed conict. Drawing upon the emotive discourse of motherhood as a means of political participation has its important precedents in Sri Lanka or South America, where women mobilized against patriarchal regimes eager to sacrice their citizens lives.5 The Belgrade demonstrations took place towards the end of June and in early July 1991 in the context of the unilateral declaration of independence that both Slovenia and Croatia announced on 25 June 1991. At the very beginning, these demonstrations were a spontaneous reaction of women to what was at that point still considered among many to be a civil war.6 The protestors were requesting the immediate termination of the armed conict and the release from the Army of all the soldiers who had completed their military term. They were claiming that recruits should stay in their own republics of residence,7 and that they should be

Malathi de Alwis, Motherhood as a space of protest: Womens political participation in contemporary Sri Lanka, in Appropriating Gender: Womens Activism and the Politicization of Religion in South Asia, ed. by Amrita Basu and Patricia Jeffrey (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 185202. Although the wars of Yugoslav succession are, especially within the human rights oriented extra-institutional circles, widely perceived as Serbian aggression on Croatia and Bosnia, the conicts did have some civil war elements. For example, the people of the so-called Srpska Krajina, a part of Croatia with a predominantly Serb population, were ghting against the Croatian state. See Silvano Boli. Sociologija i unutranji rat u Jugoslaviji, Socioloki pregled, 26 (1992), 925. It was a policy of the Yugoslav Peoples Army to send recruits to a republic different from their republic of residence. By doing this, the Army was supposed to strengthen the soldiers Yugoslav identity.

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sent to other Yugoslav republics only if the country were to be attacked by a foreign enemy. The mothers, coming to Belgrade from all over the former Yugoslavia, issued a statement in July 1991 in which they said:
We refuse that our sons become the victims of senseless militarists. It is not clear what the goals are for which we should sacrice our sons. Our sons have been deceived: they have to participate in a war for which they are not the least bit responsible, in a war that has not even been declared. That they should give their lives for imperialist purposes is the project of politicians. It is a disgrace to win a fratricidal war.8

The mothers protest reached its culmination on 2 July 1991 when hundreds of them broke into the Serbian Parliament while it was still in session. Addressing the members of the Parliament and the gathered parents, one of the most prominent, if controversial, protestors, Nena Kunijevi said:
I am telling you this in my capacity of a mother of two sons who are at Vrhnica.9 It is for the sixth day now that I do not know whether they are alive or not. But I am telling you to calm down and to behave in a way that is appropriate for the parents who are suffering. Let us not react like a crowd, because that is not going to help our children. I have come here to ask for help for my children that I was proud to send to the Yugoslav Peoples Army. I have come here to ask for help for the army, for the ofcers who are not allowed to full their duties, who have been given an order to let our children act as clay pigeons. I have come to reproach the Prime Minister of this government for saying that foreign elements as culprits, for the fact that he considers Ante Markovi a culprit. I am not interested in Ante Markovi. Serbian children are children of this Parliament and this Parliament must take care of them. I do not want to criticize you because among you there are also people for whom I voted, but I am here to ask you to take the situation seriously and not to look for a culprit elsewhere but to ask yourselves why you have not taken care of that children from 27th [June 1991] to today, 2nd [July 1991].10

Licht and Drakuli argue that in July 1991 the mothers movement was already heavily politically manipulated.11 They doubt that any group of citizens could storm the republic parliament without any ofcial support when the country was already at war. It is in any case certain that the mothers protest remained a spontaneous and unpoliticized gathering for a rather short period of time. The belligerent Belgrade ofcials quickly understood that the energy of the mothers demonstrations and their determination to protect their children could interfere with their political programmes. Soon after its emergence in Belgrade, the mothers movement started to spread across the country, but it also acquired a political dimension that triggered its fragmentation along national and ideological lines. Some Serbian mothers began to promote the idea that the Yugoslav Peoples Army was the guarantor of peace and freedom on
8 9 10

11

Hughes et al., 1995, p. 513. A Yugoslav Peoples Army camp in Slovenia. Duan Bauk and Jasna Jankovi. Radio interview with Nena Kunijevi. <http://www.b92.net/emisije/ katarza/2001_0623.phtml> [accessed 2 May 2011]. Sonja Licht and Slobodan Drakuli, When the Word for a Peacenik was Women: War and Gender in the Former Yugoslavia in Research on Russia and Eastern Europe: Women in Post-Communism ed. by Barbara Wejnert, Metta Spencer and Slobodan Drakuli (New York: JAI Press, 1996), pp. 11139.

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Yugoslav territory. These women were carrying banners saying We are the Army as well (I mi smo armija). Nena Kunijevi became the leader of the so-called Movement of the mothers of Yugoslavia (Pokret majki Jugoslavije), an organization that was informally known as Bundesliga because its members appeared at public protests dressed in fur.12 As the above extract indicates, the activists who belonged to the group led by Kunijevi were demonstrating against the Yugoslav federal government and its nal President, Ante Markovi, who resigned a few months after the mothers protest, on 20 December 1991, after his unsuccessful attempts to keep the federation together. They were prompting the mothers to gather in front of the Federal Presidency rather than in front of the Ministry of Defence (Savezni sekretarijat narodne odbrane), which was in charge of the military operations in an atmosphere in which the Army practically did not have a civilian commander-in-chief. The Movement of the mothers of Yugoslavia had tight links with the Serbian political regime as it was supposed to prepare the Serbian public for the retreat of the Yugoslav Army from Slovenia.13 However, the political agenda of some of the mothers from Serbia did not pass unnoticed. In September 1991, the Belgrade-based Centre for Anti-War Actions issued a statement in which it warned anti-war activists that the authorities were heavily manipulating motherly feelings:
A very important and among the media particularly popular exponent of these manipulations is the so called Initiative Council of a non-existent organization of the Serbian mothers led by Nena Kunijevi. In her appearances, she is trying to give an impression that the mothers in Serbia are unanimous in their judgement of the Yugoslav Peoples Armys role in the civil war. She is doing this with a latent tendency of toppling the supreme command of the armed forces, that is, its president Stjepan Mesi. [. . .] Many mothers of Serbian soldiers are coming to the Centre for Anti-War Actions because they do not want to be manipulated and they do not acknowledge Nena Kunijevi as their legitimate representative. They go on with their request that the armed conict must be unconditionally terminated.14

On the other hand, the mothers from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia were protesting against the Yugoslav Army and requesting their sons immediate release from the Armys camps. On 29 August 1991 another big gathering of Yugoslav mothers took place in Belgrade under the name Rampart of Love [Bedem ljubavi]. The mothers arrived in buses from Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia and initially planned to protest in front of the Ministry of Defence, but the ofcials of the Army and the police were preventing them from entering the city centre. The protestors were diverged towards the solder barracks in Topider (a Belgrade municipality) where they were joined by the activists of the Belgrade Centre for Anti-War Actions who did not know that mothers were not allowed to reach the Ministry. The Croat
12 13

14

Bunda is a Serbo-Croatian word for a fur coat. The political connections of the movement with the regime were also evident in the case of Stanislava Buba Morina. A prominent member of the Movement of the mothers of Yugoslavia, she later became a government ofcial in charge of the refugees coming from Croatia and Bosnia. Against the Manipulation of Mothers, a statement of the Center for Anti-War Actions, in Women for Peace (Belgrade: ene u crnom, 1993), p. 14.

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peace activist Zoran Otri who attended the Rampart of Love reported in ARKzin that the group of mothers around Nena Kunijevi gave a TV and radio statement the day before in which they criticized the gathering and supported the Yugoslav Peoples Army.15 In spite of this announcement, which was repeatedly aired on the Belgrade TV and radio stations, this group was also present at the Topider barracks. Among the Belgrade-based independent anti-war activists, however, there was a sentiment that the mothers from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were not trying to prevent their children from joining republic military forces that were at that time formed in these ex-republics. In Croatia, the newly established government gave the mothers more than twenty buses with which they visited Strasbourg, Brussels and other European cities where they were repeating their requests towards the Yugoslav Peoples Army. When these women came to Belgrade towards the end of the Summer 1991, they wanted to see the Yugoslav Army Generals Kadijevi and Adi (they were eventually addressed by General Marko Njegovanovi). They did not express any wish to establish contacts with Serbian anti-war activists. Croatian, Bosnian and Macedonian mothers in Belgrade even formed a Council with their common requests. The lack of willingness to cooperate was not so favourably received by the Belgrade (independent) activists who supported the women. This is how Lepa Mlaenovi, a well-known pacist and feminist activist who was at the mothers gathering in Topider remembers the event in question:
I was very excited. The rst night the auditorium of the soldiers barracks in Belgrade was packed with women. It was amazing. Never before in this male space had there been such a scene. At the front of the auditorium, on the podium, were the fathers the army ofcers. The women were sitting everywhere, talking and eating. At one point women from villages in Croatia stopped listening to the men and started to softly sing a tender old Croat song. In contrast to the fathers in uniform with their hard strict military culture, the womens voices were from another world. On the other hand, at that time if more than twenty women got together, I had to wonder how it happened. It usually meant that some larger political thought or organization stood behind the event.16

The mothers who gathered at the Topider military camp were exposed to physical exhaustion and psychological strain. They were hardly given any food, there was no ventilation and those parents and activists who left the building were not allowed to return. Anti-war activists from other parts of Yugoslavia were denied entrance which was reserved only for the regime-oriented journalists. Pavluko Imirovi, a Belgrade civic activist who was supporting the women with his wife Jelka, was beaten and arrested. Around noon on the following day, the Army ofcials started to release the buses with women, after managing to separate those from Croatia from women from Bosnia-Herzegovina. The mothers protests to a considerable extent operated against their proclaimed objectives to stop the war and secure human lives. In spite of the good intentions of the majority of them, the mothers soon came under the inuence of the nationalistic republic authorities who became afraid of the womens potential to challenge
15 16

ARKzin was a magazine of the Anti-War Campaign of Croatia. ARKzin, 1 (1991), p. 6. Hughes et al., p. 520.

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ethnocratic agendas. Along with more open instances of repression (arrests, threats, exhaustion, barricades, organized counter-meetings in favour of the Army (in Serbia) etc.), the fragmentation and eventual dispersion of the mothers demonstrations was a clear consequence of what will subsequently become a widely popular republic governments involvement strategy which I call grievance hijacking. Grievance hijacking is a mechanism through which a nationalistic elite attempts to weaken an authentic social movement or initiative by appropriating some of its members and strategic choices or surreptitiously inserting its own people into the protesting collective. Such activists, operating on behalf of the authorities, keep the main movement objective (in this case the return of children from the army) while pairing it with a specic political goal which cannot be shared within the original group. This mechanism promotes confusion and distrust among the activists. It disables the feelings of solidarity by creating at least two groups who are ostensibly arguing for the same cause while having fundamentally different aims. Thus, instead of pacifying the situation and strengthening cooperation, the mothers movement actually incited ethnic tensions. Through constant internal dissonance, the mothers also hijacked the Yugoslav peace movement. They drew a lot of public and media attention by exploiting motherly feelings which were more easily understandable in comparison to the intricacies of the Yugoslav political realities. They did this at the expense of a true pacist contention which remained marginalized and unknown.17 In a complete perversion of the original movement objective, these women strengthened the patriarchal stereotype of the mother of the nation proud to have a son ghting for his country. They also gave the impression that an authentically Yugoslav anti-war option was implausible because they did not manage to maintain communication or agree on their common goals. The failure of the mothers movement at the very beginning of the wars of Yugoslav succession had important implications for the nature of trans-Yugoslav womens relations because it contributed to the instauration of ethnicity as the primary criterion of social life. In doing so, the mothers went counter to the decade-long efforts of Yugoslav feminists to promote womens solidarity and carve out a political position which afforded gender-related concerns precedence over national afliations.

Yugoslav feminism and the wars of Yugoslav succession

Belgrade feminist activists from very early on supported the mothers movement although they understood that the initiative was prone to manipulation. Among the women who were particularly vocal at the beginning of the wars of Yugoslav succession were the members of the Belgrade Women Lobby [Beogradski enski lobi]. From September 1990 when the Lobby announced its Minimal programme of women requests [Minimalni program enskih zahteva] until its last public statement in August 1998, the lobbyists were criticizing state actions recognized as patriarchal, discriminatory and belligerent. All the declarations of the Lobby were intended to afrm womens rights and promote protection of women as the most numerous social
17

Kora, Linking arms, unpaginated.

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group undergoing marginalization. Nadeda etkovi one of the founding members of the Lobby, reminisces:
The Lobby has never been ofcially registered with the police. It does not have a stamp. It does not have a president, secretary, formal members or rules. It does not have nancial means or treasurer. It does not have materially supported projects or administration. The members of the Lobby do not need that. All written texts, demonstrations or gatherings are a product of the members voluntary work. The cohesive force of the Lobby resides in the convictions of its members. Even when they had personal misunderstandings, the women were agreeing quickly on the Lobbys actions.18

The emergence and operation of autonomous anti-war feminist groups on the Yugoslav territory cannot be understood without appreciating the long-term trajectories of the Yugoslav feminist organizing which can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century. This engagement was from its very beginning coloured by a socialist ideology.19 In 1919 Croat and Serbian women founded the Secretariat of Women Socialists [Sekretarijat ena socijalista] which operated within the Socialist Workers Party [Socijalistika radnika partija]. They could, thus, rather quickly establish ideological linkages with young communists and anti-fascists who in 1941 initiated the Peoples Liberation War [Narodno-oslobodilaka borba]. Although Yugoslav partisans mostly counted on womens material and logistic support (collection and distribution of food, nding accommodation for refugees and children etc.) many Yugoslav women were active ghters and a few of them were also declared national heroes by the post-war Tito regime. The political involvement of women intensied towards the end of the war and in the immediate post-war period. Women from all Yugoslav republics (except from Macedonia they could not reach Bosanski Petrovac because of the still nonliberated territories) established the Antifascist Womens Front [Antifaistiki front ena] whose principal tasks were the liberation of the country, the improvement of t womens social and educational standing and the struggle for the equality of women and men. Once the war was over, the Front represented Yugoslav women in the international women movement and was one of the founding members of the International Democratic Women Federation. Yugoslav progressive legislature equalized the legal status of men and women in all spheres of life and it incorporated all international conventions pertaining to women rights.20 Yugoslav women voted for the Constitutional Assembly as early as in 1945 and abortions were legalized in 1951. These sweeping emancipatory measures unprecedented in the history of the Yugoslav people never really succeeded in destabilizing the deeply entrenched patriarchal values. Given that the Front was numerically more powerful than the Communist Party itself, the Party authorities started considering it a potentially threatening organization. Faced with political pressures, the Front disbanded in 1953 and decided to join the Union of the Socialist Working People. The argument of the
18

19 20

Nadeda etkovi, enska politika perspektiva 77 apela, zahteva, protesta, informacija, parola Beogradskog enskog lobija (Belgrade: Beogradski enski lobi, 1998), p.9. Svetlana Slapak, Rat i ene u bivoj Jugoslaviji, Republika, 145146. Slobodanka Nedovi. Savremeni feminizam: Poloaj i uloga ena u drutvu (Belgrade: CESID, 2005).

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regime was that socialism as an ideology already incorporated the necessity of equalising the status of men and women and that feminism as such was no longer needed. That is an important bifurcation point from which any feminist engagement will be perceived as non-authentic and bourgeois. The abolishing of the Antifascist Women Front was a serious blow for the emancipation of women although their social standing continued to improve along with the economic development of the country.21 In spite of many positive trends, Yugoslavia still witnessed appreciable regional and republic differences as well as serious gender-related urban-rural imbalances. For many women there was a painful discrepancy between the proclaimed equality policies of the communist regime and their everyday social reality which was coloured by male dominance, sexism and discrimination. In the wake of the global 1968 student demonstrations, there were groups of highly educated women in Yugoslav urban centres, mostly Zagreb and Belgrade, who were dissatised by the position of women in the Yugoslav society. They were at the same time well-informed about the contemporary feminist tendencies in the Western world. As a result of this, feminist ideas became ever more present in the Yugoslav public space, especially in Croatia where a feminist agenda developed within the Croatian Sociological Society [Hrvatsko socioloko drutvo] already in the rst half of the 1970s. Yugoslav intellectual feminism reached its culmination point with the conference Comrade Woman. The Woman Question: A New Approach? [Drug-ca ena. ensko pitanje. Novi pristup?], which took place in 1978.22 This conference was an important event because it marked the penetration of the second wave of feminism into the realm of Eastern Europe. It also connected Yugoslav feminists both synchronically and diachronically: on the one hand, Yugoslav feminists started recovering their obscured (pre-war and war) traditions and, on the other, they forged linkages among Yugoslav republics and the world. Jasmina Teanovi, one of the organizers of the conference, says:
Everything did not start in 1978 . . . there is some kind of continuity, we are preserving something that has been going on for centuries . . . so, that [the Conference] was the rst feminist gathering in South-East Europe; it took place away from the Party establishment and it did not ask for the Partys approval. The three of us [with Dunja Blaevi and arana Papi] were doing everything alone. That was not some kind of partisan feminism, there were girls and women from all over the world, among them there were also stars of the feminist movement [. . .] when the conference was over, the press started attacking us in an organized fashion. We were terrorists, we were destroying the society, we were supercial, bourgeois, we were importing a foreign ideology into our fantastic country.23

The 1978 Belgrade conference highlighted a major characteristic of the new Yugoslav feminism. Although the feminists critique was directed towards the authorities,
21

22

23

For a detailed analysis of the Yugoslav Antifascist Women Front see Lydia Sklevicky. ene, konji, ratovi. (Zagreb: enska infoteka, 1996), Chapters 2 and 3. Blagojevi, 1998; Chiara Bonglioli, Belgrade 1978: Remembering the conference Drug-ca ena. ensko pitanje novi pristup? (2010) <http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl> [accessed on 2 May 2011]. As cited in ene za mir, ed. by Staa Zajovi (Belgrade: ene u crnom, 2007), p. 14.

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their engagement was not anti-socialist. The conference took place at the Belgrade Student Cultural Centre [Studentski kulturni centar] which, although a hotbed of critical social energy, was nanced by the state. The activists had a strong Yugoslav and leftist orientation critical of the hypocrisy of the communist rulers. This is nicely captured by Dragan Klai, a male conference participant:
You have to understand that we were not criticizing Yugoslav self-management socialism as such. We were criticizing the sexist elements of the Yugoslav system with which we generally identied. In that sense, it was not a radical critique of Yugoslav socialism . . . These were progressive leftist intellectuals, but anti-dogmatic, critical, especially of the ofcial Yugoslav ideology and the ideological jargon and the ideological facade, but not anti-socialist . . . and with a steady critical analysis of capitalism, as well.24

In the wake of the conference, two groups called Women and Society were established rst in Zagreb and then in Belgrade. In 1986, the Belgrade group dened itself as feminist and it operated without any state nancial or institutional support. Although it faced much resistance from governmental organizations devoted to women, feminist engagement led to a proliferation of workshops and public discussions visited by feminists from across Yugoslavia. Yugoslav feminists also organized three pan-Yugoslav gatherings, the last of which took place in Ljubljana in 1991. In such an atmosphere, some women felt that the moment was ripe for direct interventions in womens lives. They decided to establish SOS hotlines for women and children who were victims of violence and to give them spaces for talking about their experiences. The rst SOS hotline was opened in Zagreb in 1988, the second in Ljubljana (1989) and the third in Belgrade (1990). The establishment of these hotlines sharpened the second major characteristic of the Yugoslav (and world) feminism which had important political implications. As Yugoslav feminism developed, there was an ever deeper division between theorists one the one hand and practitioners (activists) on the other. These two groups accused each other of not doing enough for the womens cause. The Yugoslav 1970s feminists were without exception highly educated upper class women occupying university posts or possessing other professional afliations which were mostly intellectual or theoretical in nature. Positioned in a more or less secure social context of Yugoslav socialism, these women did not have a political agenda which would have been fundamentally at odds with the ruling regime. As it was the case with some other (non-feminist) civic activists in Belgrade, many of these women could embrace feminism as a certain kind of (intellectual) lifestyle because they were children of well-established party functionaries, Yugoslav Peoples Army generals, ambassadors or other public gures.25 Many of them grew up in politically-oriented environments which provided them access to informal networks of power and knowledge. As members of a supra-national, trans-European urban class, these women had at their disposal both intellectual and social tools that made it possible for them to engage in non-radically transformative civic activism. However, as republic nationalisms became omnipresent throughout Yugoslavia, some feminists felt that they brought with them sweeping militarisation and patriarchy
24 25

Bonglioli, p. 100. In Belgrade, for example, Daa Duhaek, Jasmina Teanovi, Biljana Kovaevi-Vuo, Borka Pavievi etc.

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that threatened to undo the women-oriented legacies of Yugoslav socialism. With the deterioration of the political situation in Yugoslavia, feminist work acquired a more political dimension. In the Serbian context, it tried to clearly distance itself from the rising nationalist sentiment. That is why some of the Belgrade SOS hotline activists who were not hitherto politically engaged decided that they could not do without more politically-oriented actions. They established the above-mentioned Belgrade Women Lobby which issued around twenty anti-war public statements and organized anti-war gatherings. These activities could not have been particularly effective as the organizers remained invisible to the wider public and only had access to the anti-war oriented media. The symbiosis of the theoretical and the practical has never been as successful as it has been in the Belgrade-based Women in Black [ene u crnom], a feminist pacist organization founded in October 1991. Staa Zajovi, the key gure of the organization, was active in the group Women and Society and was also a co-founder of the SOS hotline and the Belgrade Women Lobby. Soon after the establishment of the Centre for Anti-War Actions, some women grew increasingly dissatised with its operation because of the way it perpetuated gender inequalities. Staa Zajovi reminiscences:
My engagement at the Centre for Anti-War Actions was a logical continuation of my antimilitarist attitude. Mostly women worked at the Center, so it looked to me that peace activism had to do with only one sex, as if it were a part of our traditional women role: caring for others, consolation, hiding, support giving. That it was an invisible, hidden, unacknowledged womens work. As a feminist I know that it was a continuation of our house work. It was something that had a therapeutic effect, but it did not have a transformative character. It was important for me to establish a women pacist group, so that women work would not remain invisible and unacknowledged, because that would have been unjust. Our engagement for peace is not our natural role, it is not our motherly duty, it is our political choice (authors emphasis) and our cultural stance.26

The Belgrade-based Women in Black have articulated a radical anti-nationalist attitude. In doing so, they have assumed a particularly marginal and precarious position on the Serbian political scene which does not appreciate the complexity of mutually perpetuating, antithetical forces operating within the (post-)Yugoslav political arena. Arguing in favour of the plurality of personal accounts and state histories, anti-war oriented Belgrade feminists faced a serious dilemma as the dissolution of Yugoslavia became imminent. On the one hand, they could not easily abandon their Yugoslav attitude which was a matter of personal, political and geographical orientation articulated during the most prosperous decades in post-Second World War Yugoslavia. On the other hand, it was impossible for them to argue against the separation of other Yugoslav republics as that might have implied that they were in favour of the military means used by the Serbian regime to secure the integrity of the country. As one Belgrade anti-war feminist activist says:

26

Zajovi et al., pp. 1617.

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The whole world is my country. I want to work for values that are more open than nationalism. When Slovenia and Croatia wanted independence, I supported unity, but that meant I supported the war. I wanted to support unity, but I needed to respect their choice for independence and I could not support crimes. I had political doubts about the motivations of some people who wanted separate states. Because populations in the republics are so mixed, I knew that separating Yugoslavia would be very difcult and risky. I am not happy with the nationalistic state and their patterns of domination.27

By waging wars in other Yugoslav republics on behalf of Yugoslavia, the Miloevi regime permanently hijacked Yugoslavism. Many women anti-war activists in Serbia realized that the new state of affairs would not allow them to identify as Yugoslav. Although a number of them were ethnically Serb, many found it impossible to embrace such a constricted national identity. In a letter sent to a friend in Zagreb and published in Arkzin, Lepa Mlaenovi, a prominent Belgrade anti-war activist, writes:
We the feminists [in Serbia] are currently in a crevice, without a national identity. We were Yugoslavs [Jugoslovenke], but that concept no longer comprises everything that it used to it is now reserved for Yugo-Serbs and we are not Yugoslavs anymore. And to be Serbs [Srpkinje] now looks like siding with the ruling politics. And that is impossible. Well, in any case, I am a woman, feminist, lesbian and I do not care about not having a national identity, because all of these are important to me and all of them I feel fully.28

The Miloevi regime did not only usurp the idea of Yugoslavism for its myopic nationalist goals, but it successfully capitalized on the legacy and popular support of the Yugoslav Communist Party. After the introduction of political pluralism in Yugoslavia and immediately prior to the countrys disintegration, the regime started/ continued to operate within the framework of a socialist party (Socialist Party of Serbia). This coupling of nationalistic rhetoric with illusory socialist policies of the corrupted authorities contaminated the idea of the left in the Serbian/(post-)Yugoslav political space. Such unusual linkages provided a fertile ground for an ideological confusion which forced many anti-war feminist activists to opt for a lesser evil and side with political actors who would not under normal circumstances be considered their allies. Thus, some anti-war oriented feminists found themselves among protesters against the regime who disliked the regime not so much because of its belligerent character, but because of its communist legacy. This peculiar cohabitation of divergent political options is an important feature of civic engagement in Serbia in the 1990s, which existed up to the overthrow of Miloevis rule. This is illustrated by the following extract:
Some of us believed in some of the socialist ideas that were legitimated by former Communist governments; relative social equality, free education, free health care and access to abortion, inexpensive housing and cultural events. [. . .] But we are facing the fact that the realisation of our beliefs has come to an end. So for those of us who are not Serbians yet, who are not Yugoslavs anymore and feel the loss of womens rights with the fall of Communism, there is a lot of identity work to be done. [. . .] We know that to
27 28

Hughes et al., p.522. Lepa Mlaenovi, Draga Nataa, ARKzin, 4 (1992), p.16.

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overthrow the present government we have to vote for another one that will be against us, and we must take that responsibility; we know that if we are to manifest our disobedience towards the war and be noticed, we have to stand in the oppositions street-crowds and feel awful among sexist, royalist speeches and songs; we know that if we stand on the streets as small womens groups against war we expose ourselves to insults, but we still do that and feel brave [. . .] we know that if we are to say aloud who we are and what we want there will be no historically accepted political patterns for our experience of our language. And yet here we are.29

Moreover, the beginning of the war on Yugoslav territory impacted powerfully on the nature of relationships between the feminists in Belgrade and Zagreb. The most important feminist initiative in Croatia was the Centre for Women Victims of War [Centar za ene rtve rata], founded in Zagreb in November 1992. Similarly to the Belgrade-based Women in Black, the activists of the Centre were harsh critics of the Croatian nationalist regime and the Croatian Catholic Church which supported its policies. The operation of the Centre was based on the principle that assistance would be offered to all women in need of help regardless of their ethnic origin, nationality or religion. It represented a shelter for thousands of women refugees coming from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Although the majority of Yugoslav feminist activists were interested in maintaining contact after the initiation of armed conict, opportunities for communication gradually became fewer. This was primarily due to severed telephone lines and post services, but ideological-emotional tensions also appeared. Women were forced to meet at feminist gatherings outside their republics of residence. Vesna Kesi, a wellknown Yugoslav journalist and co-founder of the Centre for Women Victims of War, herself organized one of these meetings:
Communication was always there . . . exchange of information and some kind of loyalty, but joint actions were impossible . . . apart from that, our situations were appreciably different as well as our perceptions of . . . how Serbia looked in Croatia and how Croatia looked in Serbia, these were different things . . . we had our rst womens pacist meeting in 1993 and I myself organized one in Geneva where we also brought women from Bosnia . . . there were attempts at multilateral gatherings from the very beginning, but all of us had our own priorities . . . then, we all gathered in 1995 in Beijing for a conference on women . . . we were together all the time, everyone was coming to us saying: hmm, these Balkan women know how to have fun, so they wanted to be with us . . . and then, we would all sing Yugoslav songs . . .30

While such gatherings obviously had a certain emotional relevance for the women participating, they were not always favourably looked upon by other members of the anti-war community. Having fun far away from home and singing Yugoslav songs in Geneva or Beijing would have been impossible for the vast majority of Yugoslav people in the rst half of the 1990s. The fact that many anti-war activists thanks to donations (especially in Croatia) and previously acquired social and symbolic
29

30

Lepa Mlaenovi and Vera Litriin, Belgrade Feminists 1992: Separation, guilt and identity crisis, Feminist Review, 45 (1993), 11319, p.119. Interview with Vesna Kesi, journalist, Zagreb, 10/01/2010.

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capital were able to travel while their countries were under international sanctions (Serbia) or in a full-edged military conict (Croatia and Bosnia), lent some of them the ominous label of anti-war proteers. This label signied that some activists acquired privileges and positions which they probably would not have access to in normal circumstances. This aspect of anti-war engagement would become particularly relevant in the post-war period. It would be, however, erroneous to think that the international gatherings of Yugoslav feminists were always pleasant encounters. Whereas the core of the Belgrade feminists assumed an anti-national orientation from very early on, the initiation of the armed conict marked an important ssure within the Croatian feminist circles. Some Croat feminists began to support their nationalist regime in a way which made them attribute the responsibility for the war to all members of the Serbian nation. They imposed a clear-cut division between the aggressors (Serbs) on the one hand, and the victims (Croats and Muslims) on the other. This divisive line was particularly relevant in relation to the issue of rapes during the war and the question of whether the raped women were victims as women or as members (and even personications) of their nation.31 At the same time, nationalist feminist activists began to promote themselves as the representatives of all Croatian women. This position was criticized as illegitimate by other feminists in Croatia who kept their authentic anti-national and socialist stance. In her editorial for the rst issue of the feminist magazine Kruh i rue [Bread and roses], which she founded in Zagreb along with a womens archive and publishing house Women Directory [enska infoteka], ura Kneevi, a well-known feminist and anti-war activist, notes:
If the public space for women in the former regime [Titos regime] was narrow, after the 1990s election and especially towards the beginning of the war, it was facing complete extinction. In those conditions, the acceptance of nationalism among such groups [of Croatian feminists] represented only a possibility of having a much wider activist space which also brings sweeping social acclaim. But they do not ask themselves what is the quality of that society and even more importantly what is their role in that society. However, it is evident that such a ticket for entering into the political arena is wrong. [. . .] the nationalistically oriented feminists and feminist groups used this occasion to yet again play the role which was given to them in the male-dominated political sphere. They are appearing as advocates of transcendental collectivities of Croats or Muslims (or of Serbs in Serbia) by repeating their old roles of wives, mothers, sisters, care-givers . . .32

These tensions became apparent, for example, during a third country meeting organized by Italian feminists in Venice in 1992. In the spirit of feminist solidarity, the organizers wanted to create a platform for exchange of painful experiences which women had at both sides of the frontline. Such an enterprise turned out to be much
31

32

See Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. by Alexandra Stiglmayer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) for a controversial position of the American feminist and lawyer Catherine MacKinnon on the rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the reactions of Yugoslav feminists such as Slapak (1995). See also Maja Kora, Ethnic conict, rape and feminism: the case of Yugoslavia, in Women in PostCommunism. Research on Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. by Barbara Wejnert and Metta Spencer (London: JAI Press), pp. 247265. ura Kneevi, Mi nasuprot ja ili problem politikog identiteta u feministikom odnosno enskom pokretu u Hrvatskoj Kruh i rue, 1 (1994).

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more challenging that it had been initially expected. Nadeda etkovi, a Belgrade feminist and co-founder of the Belgrade Women Lobby took part in this gathering. She reminisces:
Italian women were mediators, but the communication was very hard, almost impossible. I felt that the discussion was, in a way, the imposition of guilt upon us [feminists from Serbia]. We had already been protesting on the street here [in Belgrade], and had been exposing our bodies against the regime. That wasnt naive, because we were approached by people who were spitting at us, pushing us, pulling our hair out, shouting that we are traitors; however, all that somehow hadnt been recognized as sufcient, and I couldnt gure out what we were supposed to do to go to Zagreb and let the bombs fall onto our heads?! The frustration was enormous, and I did try to understand, but my feelings were hurt.33

Deep scars on the relationship between Belgrade and Zagreb, the two principal centres of Yugoslav feminism, did not appear only because some women decided to actively embrace their national identity in radically changed political circumstances. In a highly volatile political climate characterized by ethnic nationalism and lack of communication, even those sites of social life which would claim to be alternative and counter-hegemonic nd themselves threatened by the process of ethnicisation. National identity is not only naturally rediscovered as an important dimension of the self, but it tends to be automatically attributed also to those who cannot personally identify with such an afliation. This is particularly evident in environments which are less familiar with the complexities of the original social and political context. In one of the rst third country meetings in 1991, three pacist feminist activists from Zagreb and three from Belgrade toured Germany within the framework of the manifestation the Week of Peace organized by a group of pacists from Mainz. The activists were invited to express their views on the Yugoslav crisis and inform the audience about their own civic engagement in cities across Germany. It was also an opportunity for these women to meet after several months of severed communication channels. As their tour unfolded, they realized that there were politicoemotional issues on which the two groups could not agree. One of the activists from Croatia who took part in the tour remembers:
The problem was that we did not have a closed space in which we could talk, but we had to perform, we had to play our roles and we did play our roles of Serbian and Croat women wanting to cooperate. That is a very funny thing you actually become your own stereotype and you go on playing the role, you cannot resist it. When you begin, you are introduced as someone from Zagreb, the other one is introduced as someone from Belgrade, you are immediately categorized. [. . .] We [women from Croatia] were talking about what we were doing, what kind of projects we were working on . . . they [women from Serbia] had a more political approach which was very effective there because the German pacist circles were very left-oriented . . . we were saying that those republics which wanted to separate should be allowed to do so, whereas they argued that Yugoslavia should remain united . . . but when I think about that today, I realise that we were saying things on the basis of the context from which we were coming . . .34
33 34

Kora, 1998, unpaginated. Interview with AB, peace activist, Zagreb, 20/06/2010.

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More than anything, however, these women pacists had personal war-related experiences that were emotionally charged and therefore went beyond the level of rational understanding and argumentation. They were coming from fundamentally different political and social realities: the activists from Croatia were experiencing war in their own hometowns and were afraid for their loved ones in the purely existential sense. The women from Serbia did not have a rst-hand war experience and they, at least at the beginning of the conict, could afford a much more political approach to their engagement. The above cited activist continues:
I know that I lost my temper so many times there . . . we were such easy prey to our own stereotypes . . . for example, Biljanas [Biljana Kai, a member of the group] children were still small at that time and they were living close to a Yugoslav Peoples Army camp, so she was constantly in touch with her husband . . . and the women from Belgrade both understand and at the same time do not fully understand, because they somehow did not believe, they could not believe what was going on . . . for example, my grandmother lived in Dalmatia in a village which was occupied and when I said that the village was occupied, that she could not move, a women from Belgrade said: you are seeing it all in terms of territories. And I was not interested in any territories, those were some kind of facts, they could not move and some other people could move . . . it was very difcult to explain . . .35

As the armed conict unfolded, the asymmetries of power and the differing social realities of the sides involved in it were becoming ever more evident in everyday life. The harsh actuality of war pushed the capacities of understanding and empathy to their very limits. Although many Belgrade activists were far away from either nancial or existential serenity, their position could not be compared to those who were in the midst of military destruction. Such differences stimulated the fundamental concerns among Serbian anti-war feminist activists regarding their political agency and the purposefulness of their civic engagement. While an emotional mixture of guilt and shame was rejected by women at the extremes of the political spectrum anarchists and nationalists, others experienced it as members of the nation on behalf of which serious war crimes were committed. Some women started to wonder about possible dialogic platforms which would enable communication and allow for an exchange of painful but radically different experiences. After the end of their nationally-oriented regimes in 2000, both Serbia and Croatia opted for the painful process of becoming members of the European Union. This meant that the legal and social status of women became an issue of state concern, yet another item on a long list of legal and political measures that the ascending countries would need to undertake before they could assume their place in the community of European nations. Such a development united state bureaucrats and feminist activists in their goal of improving womens social conditions. On the other hand, it put the subversive character of women engagement at stake and reduced the space for autonomous women organizing. In the post-war regroupings on the civic scene, some of these women managed to rmly position themselves within the new system of power relations in which state institutions, which have recovered their inuence
35

Ibid.

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and legitimacy, are in need of expert knowledge. This is how Nadeda Radovi, a long-term Yugoslav feminist activist, evaluates recent trends in the sphere of women organizing:
[. . .] We do not need courses in which one all of a sudden becomes an expert (ekspertkinja), but a patient articulation of a media and institutional space for the recognition, support and afrmation of women need and requests . . . [. . .] some women found the right arrangement, they have formed a network, they have assumed positions which bring them both nancial and social benets (i mast i ast) . . . they travel, visit international conferences and gatherings without any obligation to write something, to articulate something, they have well paid projects . . . those who do not notice this have lost touch with reality [. . .] these are, however, quasi-women networks, they are actually networks of power [. . .] but the question remains as to the extent to which such networking excludes all other women, all of those who are neither daughters, nor mistresses, nor friends of the rich women . . .36

In such circumstances, some Belgrade feminists without a substantive activist experience beneted from the appreciable amount of intellectual capital accrued throughout the previous two decades within the framework of Yugoslav feminism. This is particularly evident in the case of the Belgrade Centre for Women Studies [Centar za enske studije] which was founded in 1991 by the abovementioned feminist group Woman and Society. The Centre acted both as an educational institution offering programmes in the eld of feminist and gender theory, and as an independent womens activist group. It represented an important place of womens gathering, both socially and intellectually. However, the Centre has recently decided to be incorporated into the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Belgrade where its former leaders appear in the capacity of associate and full professors. A general lack of political subversiveness among the feminist activists in the postwar Yugoslav space is a consequence of the fusion of externally propagated (and internally poorly attenuated) neo-liberal political and economic tendencies, on the one hand, and a long-term orientation of the (post-) Yugoslav civic spheres on human rights on the other. The insistence on human rights at the expense of social and political rights of women, workers and the youth, for example, is the legacy of the civic engagement in the socialist context in which, contrary to the current trend, social rights were promoted at the expense of human rights. Thus, while engaging with instances of gender discrimination, feminist organizations in the post-war period, which continued the tradition of feminist anti-war organizing in the newly created national frameworks, generally are not interested in destabilizing the political paradigm that might be the cause of such discrimination. Feminism in the (post-) Yugoslav context has, in general, lost its critical stance towards the state apparatus. It has succumbed to the process in which the state delegates to women organizations a portion of its own responsibility to care for the social welfare of its (women) citizens. Thus, instead of positioning themselves in a critical relationship to the state, the post-war feminists in the Yugoslav space have become a part of a meso-level civil
36

Nadeda Radovi, Pevanje i plakanje, Vreme, 622 (2002). <http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=328708> [accessed 15 April 2011].

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society which acts as an intermediary between the legislators and the citizens. These tend to be well-paid posts which are not conducive to authentic political transformations.

Conclusion
Any interpretation of the wars of Yugoslav succession and the grassroots efforts made to obstruct them is decient if it neglects their very important gender dimension. Womens anti-war and pacist activisms, which started unfolding already in the early 1990s, initiated a cycle of contention which was a reaction to the rapid degradation of the political circumstances in the former Yugoslavia. The civic engagement of Yugoslav women in relation to the Yugoslav wars constitutes a nice illustration for the conceptual differentiation between anti-war activism, on the one hand, and pacist activism, on the other. Whereas many Yugoslav mothers protested against the Yugoslav Peoples Army and their sons involvement in it (anti-war engagement), they did not manage to articulate a broader political platform that would have established peace and non-violence as values which supersede political, ethnic and religious boundaries (pacist engagement). The rapid suppression of the mothers movement is a consequence of their inability to forge stronger links with the already existing instances of women political organizing in the Yugoslav space. A biologically-based motive may be a powerful driving force behind civic engagement, but it must undergo a process of politicization if it is to be employed as a basis for a sustained social campaign. Staying at the level of parental concern or acting on the basis of party instructions, these women could not generate an authentically pacist resistance to the politics of nationalism and the sweeping militarization of their societies. The failure of the mothers anti-war movement is also reective of an important feature of Yugoslav feminist engagement which intensied in the 1970s and continued throughout the wars of Yugoslav succession. However internally divergent and theoretically advanced it might have been, this engagement could not have been articulated as a structural intervention into the Yugoslav social reality which would have established gender as a politically relevant category. Yugoslav feminist activism was practiced by an upper class intellectual establishment which had socialism as an ideological undercurrent. Such theory-oriented initiatives could not have an appreciable political charge given that they were not specically addressing the state as the legislation provider. The goals of the feminist organizing were, to a considerable extent, already embedded in the political agenda of the regime. These women were, then, assuming an anti-political stance criticizing a hypocritical political culture in which the actual status of women was not substantively improved. In such circumstances, they remained distant for the centres of political decision-making. With the ascendency of ethnic nationalism, however, Yugoslav feminism parted company with the state ideology and thus excluded itself even more from the ofcial political life. The main inevitably male political gures in the post-Yugoslav space were often legitimized by diverse international powers. This, in turn, further weakened and marginalized women anti-national political voice. The patriarchal/ ethno-nationalistic backlash which stimulated the rapid (anti-)politicization of Yugoslav feminism concurrently contributed to its fragmentation, both geographically and ideologically. As communication channels became increasingly precarious,

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there were ever fewer opportunities for an exchange of painful experiences and divergent reality interpretations. Thus, many participants in the mothers movement practically stepped into a political void in which they could not establish linkages with the traditions of Yugoslav feminist organizing. Such a state of affairs made them prone to nationalistic manipulations and led to an eventual disintegration of their initiatives. The (anti-)politicization of the Yugoslav feminist engagement which manifested itself as a further distancing away from the centres of political power can be seen as a social appropriation of the already existing pan-Yugoslav feminist networks for an anti-war cause.37 Feminist activists were the principal organizers of and participants in the peace engagement in Serbia and Croatia because they could drew upon the extent traditions of women political organizing in the Yugoslav space.38 Feminist anti-war activists realized that, however dissatised they might have been with the status of women during the communist rule, their position would be much worse in the largely re-patriarchalized and re-clericalized post-Yugoslav environments. Therefore, the process of political mobilization and pacist actor constitution was more than anything else an effort to resist the powerful nationalising discourse and preserve inter-republic communication. The need to maintain contact as an investment into a peaceful future coexistence was the central engine behind the pacist enterprises organized by (post-)Yugoslav feminists. Finally, the political potential of Yugoslav feminism dissipated along with the disintegration of the political space in which it developed. Yugoslavia as a supranational community of culturally and linguistically proximate people only in its entirety constituted the right framework for feminist organizing which should be at variance with the nation-state. The post-war period, characterized by the unobstructed reproduction of the former elites, along with sweeping economic degradation of the population and the rising social inequality, deepened the already existing cleavages among the women activists, and created new ones. Those feminist activists who have adopted the deleterious neo-liberal political strategy, both as a means of physical survival and career advancement, on the post-Yugoslav territory, have incorporated their engagement into the process of normalising and legitimising the newly created nation-states. By doing so, they also contributed to the decay of the legacies of Yugoslav feminism which could not have endured the aggressive patriarchal backlash. They have, thus, closed a cycle of politico-civic engagement which has not only failed to appreciably improve the status and political agency of women, but it has actually left many of them in a worse position in the geographically, politically and socially fragmented and both economically and intellectually impoverished post-Yugoslav space.

37

38

Doug McAdam, Sid Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Given a lack of longer civic traditions, Sarajevo did not witness as intense feminist engagement as Belgrade and Zagreb, but women did self-organize on the Bosnian territory both during the war and in the post-war period (although not necessarily on feminist principles). Nada Ler Sofroni, a professor at the University of Sarajevo, was one of the organizers of the 1978 feminist conference in Belgrade. For a discussion of post-war women engagement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, see e.g., Elissa Helms, East and West Kiss: Gender, Orientalism and Balkanism in Muslim-Majority Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 88119.

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