1. Case-study No. & Title:
175. Providing psychological assistance to mourning families and establishing the first basis for a dialogue between Croats and Serbs in the village of Sotin (municipality of Vukovar, Croatia), April-November 2000

Keywords:

2. Author information
2.1 Author’s Name:
Tania Gosselin

2.2 Institutional Affiliation and Contact Details:
Central European University
Political Science Department
Nador u. 9, 1051 Budapest
Hungary

Tel.: (36 1) 262 3556 (home)
Fax: (36 1) 327 3087 (polsci dept.)
E-mail: pphgos01@phd.ceu.hu or taniagosselin@hotmail.com

2.3 Date recorded:
31/10/2000

3. Good Practice Information Sheet
3.1 Local Level Good Practice:
The first part of the Sotin project aims at providing professional psychological support to a group of Croatian women who are still grieving over the loss/disappearance of one or more relatives in the 1991 war.

The second part of the project involved training two groups of women volunteers (one mainly comprised of Serbian women, the other of Croatian women) and sending them to interview all families in Sotin in accordance with a semi-structured questionnaire. The interview process (preliminary results are reported in Section 4 below) aims at finding out what the inhabitants perceive to be the most pressing problems facing their community, to give them a chance to suggest solutions and, last, to prepare them for upcoming inter-ethnic gatherings.

The above-mentioned gatherings/workshops constitute the final phase of the project, during which both ethnic groups of Sotin are to meet. The first workshop is to be devoted to dialogue about war-time experiences. The second and last joint workshop's topic still had to be determined at the time of writing this account.

3.2 Location:
The village of Sotin, municipality of Vukovar, Eastern Slavonia, Croatia.

3.3 Minority/Target Groups:
Minority: Croats and Serbs are now approximately equal in number in Sotin itself – so the identification of the minority would depend if one was looking at Vukovar, or at Croatia as a whole.
Target group: Croatian and Serbian communities of Sotin, more particularly the Croatian families that have lost one or more members during the war.

3.4 Major Actors Involved:

3.5 Budget allocated by local government authorities and/or by other actors:
No information available (at least not at the time of writing)

3.6 Timeframe:
The initiative was proposed in 1998 by Gordana Bujisic who wanted to both help the mourning women (belonging to the Croatian community) of Sotin and to improve the quality of life in the village by initiating a communication process between the two ethnic groups. The project was launched in April 2000 with an assessment of the situation – including meetings with the mayor, the priests of Vukovar (both Catholic and Orthodox), the OSCE Police Monitoring Group as well as some representatives of the Croatian government. Useful contacts were also established with women’s associations, and in general with women of Vukovar and Vinkvoci identified as potential volunteer-interviewers.

In May 2000, workshops on conflict resolution were organised to train the future interviewers. The first two workshops were conducted separately, but the third one was mixed – i.e. attended by both Serbian women of Vukovar and Croatian women of Vinkovci.

The interviewing process was carried out in late June/early July, when all but one families were visited. During this time (in fact since the beginning of the project's implementation in April), Dr Bujisic made regular visits to the tent-chapel where a group of Croatian women every day go to pray for the missing in the main square of Sotin.

The last phase of the project (i.e. two mixed workshops bringing together Sotin families – both Serbian and Croatian – and the interviewers) got underway in October 2000. The project is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

3.7 Local level good practice relation to national level ethnic policy:
The initiative was taken by Gordana Bujisic, psychiatrist and co-ordinator of the Sotin project. The project itself is managed by a small Vukovar NGO called Projekt Gradjanske Demokratske Inicijative Vukovar. Local or other levels of authories are not involved in the project. Ms Bujisic met with Vladimiar Stengl, mayor of Vukovar, in the early phase of the project. Mr Stengl said he was aware of the difficult situation in Sotin but that did not know what to do about it. The Vukovar local government, divided between Serbian and Croatian hard-liners, does not provide support for the project but it did not discourage it either – no public criticism came either from the mayor or other members of the council.

4. Good Practice Description
Sotin is a village located in the eastern part of the municipality of Vukovar. Before 1991, a little over 55 per cent of of Sotin's inhabitants were Croats, and the remaining 45 per cent were Serbs.¹ After Vukovar was besieged and fell to the Yugoslav Army in November 1991, Serbian authorities ruled the territory of the self-declared Republika Srpska Krajina (RSK) until 1995, when Eastern Slavonia was reintegrated into Croatia. The Croats of Sotin, who had fled during or after the war, began to come back in 1998. In the course of the last few years, during the RSK period, displaced persons (Serbs) from other parts of Croatia had also settled down in Sotin. These movements altered the ethnic composition of the village's population (according to the survey carried out by the interviewers of the Sotin project, the village now counts 57 Croatian and 58 Serbian families). However, 29 people (Croats) have not come back to Sotin. They are still missing and/or presumed dead, buried in mass graves that have not been exhumed yet. A group of middle-aged Croatian women, relatives of the missing, have set up a tent in the central square of Sotin where they go to pray every day. At the door of the tent-chapel a sign says: ‘We will have the truth’. Ethnic tensions are significant in Sotin where the two communities, Croatian and Serbian, live in near-complete segregation. Furthermore, the beginning of the eviction process of people illegally occupying houses or apartments (typically the premises belong to a member of the other ethnic group), as well as so-called ‘test exhumations’ carried out during the summer, contributed to fuel these tensions.

The desire to help the women of Sotin, caught up in a mourning process that has been lasting for more than seven years, the near absence of communication between the Serbian and Croatian inhabitants of Sotin, coupled to her observation of the fact that many middle-aged women of Vukovar and neighbouring villages are confined to their homes (in part due to the very high unemployment rate affecting Vukovar) and often feel helpless and isolated, inspired Gordana Bujisic, a psychiatrist born in Vukovar who came back to the city last year after living in Yugoslavia for seven years, to start the ‘Reconciliation and Trust Establishment in Sotin’ project.

The project has three distinct goals:
First, to provide psychological assistance to Sotin’s women who have been mourning for over seven years: this was done by a professional psychiatrist making regular visits to the tent-chapel. Ms Bujisic was well received, according to her own account, and some women also contacted her at home for further advice or help. Later on, the prayer site was also visited by women from Vukovar and Vinkovci who volunteered to be part of the two groups of interviewers trained to meet and administer a questionnaire to all families in Sotin (see below).

Second, to assess the state of ‘inter-ethnic affairs’ in Sotin in the most direct manner possible, i.e. not only by asking for reports from various representatives but also by listening to the inhabitants of the village themselves, in order to identify what their priorities and their problems are, as well as what could be the possible ways to improve the quality of life in the village. The ‘listening process’ was carried out by two groups of women volunteers (a group of mostly Serbian women from Vukovar, and a group of mostly Croatian women from Vinkovci, a nearby locality) who first attended conflict resolution workshops and then visited all 114 but one family established in Sotin. The volunteers were equipped with a semi-standardised questionnaire they had to fill in during the interviews.

Thirdly, the project’s aim is to bring the members of the two ethnic communities together on two occasions so that they can initiate a dialogue based on the results of the interview process and thus (hopefully) take a first step towards reconciliation.

The project was implemented in three phases:
A) From April to July 2000, Gordana Bujisic and members of PGDR (Projeckt Gradjanske Demokratske Inicijative Vukovar, the NGO managing the Reconciliation and Trust Establishment project) carried out a general assessment of the state of inter-ethnic affairs in Sotin by meeting representatives from Sotin, Vukovar's mayor, both priests of the village (Catholic and Orthodox), representatives of the Croatian government as well as members of Organisation for the Security and Co-operation in Europe's (OSCE) Police Monitoring Group. Local authorities in Vukovar are mainly divided between hard liners from both ethnic groups.² However, no resistance or criticism of the Sotin Project came from the local government – something highly unusual, according to Ms Bujisic. During their meeting, mayor Vladimir Stengl (HDZ) told her that he did not know what to do about Sotin nor how to approach its people, ‘who keep asking for answers he does not have’

Ms Bujisic also endeavoured to meet women from Vukovar (mainly Serbs) and from Vinkovci (mainly Croats), a neighbouring locality, who could become potential interviewers. Ms Bujisic established contact with the women’s association Hrvatska zena and in particular encouraged middle-aged women to get involved, as she believes that women from the same age group as that of the mourners would be best placed to understand them and to be accepted by them.

From the very beginning of the implementation of the project, Ms. Bujisic began to visit the mourning women in the tent-chapel regularly – approximately once a week. She gave out her ‘phone number at home so that the women could get in touch with her if they needed advice or further help.

In order to publicise the project and prepare the communities for the planned interviews, Ms Bujisic attempted to gain a measure of media coverage. She gave interviews on the radio (on both Croatian and Serbian stations) three times in April and in May (as well as one more time in July.) She also gave interviews to Bosnian radio stations (Radio BiH and Radio Mostar).

B) In May and June 2000, three workshops were organised for the two groups of volunteers. The first two workshops, one in Vukovar and the other in Vinkovci, were attended separately (by Serbian women volunteers in the first city and by Croatian volunteers in the second) under the theme of conflict resolution. Two trained facilitators were invited (only one in Vinkovci) and used the Dudley Weeks method to discuss partnership conflict resolution. The third workshop, held in Vukovar, brought the two groups of women together. It constituted the first concrete element of inter-ethnic contact achieved by the project.

In late June and early July, the volunteers interviewed Sotin's families in their own homes – a list of Serbian families was provided by the Orthodox priest while the Catholic priest provided a listing of Croatian families. The volunteers visited the homes in pairs. Only one family (Croatian) refused to meet them; they are one of the families from which a relative is missing.

Ms Bujisic went on with her regular visits at the tent-chapel. As the so-called test-exhumations of mass graves took place during the summer, tensions ran very high in the village and she intervened more frequently.

C) In October 2000, the final phase of the project involves bringing together the families of both ethnic groups living in Sotin for the first time since the war, as well as the two groups of interviewers with them. The first meeting, scheduled to take place in mid-October, is intended as an informal, ‘first contact’ meeting. A second mixed meeting is to take place at some later point in the autumn and aims to facilitate the sharing of war experiences and to tackle conflict resolution issues.

At this point, some preliminary results of the analysis of the interviews carried out with the families of Sotin are already available. These preliminary results involve the answers (broken down by ethnic group) given to five questions asked by the volunteers:

1) ‘Do you know who your neighbours are?’
All the respondents from Croatian families (55) answered 'yes'. Among Serbian respondents, 54 families (93.1 per cent) said they knew their neighbours, while 4 (6.9 per cent) said they did not. This ‘shows that most of the inhabitants from Sotin know each other very well. Those who answered 'No' to this question are mostly displaced people who have been living in Sotin for only a short while.³

2) ‘Could you name at least one family of a different nationality whom you have good contact with?’
Among Croatian families, 21 (38.2 per cent) answered 'yes' and 34 (61.8 per cent) answered 'no'. Among Serbian families, 38 (65.52 per cent) answered 'yes' and 20 (34.48 per cent) said 'no'.

It appears from these results that Serbian families tend to have a better relationship with Croatian families than the other way around. The PGDI document suggests that this result might be due to the fact that 29 people are still missing from the Croat community and that the ‘mourning process for their families is not finished yet; in such a situation, we expected an even worse attitude towards the other nation’.

3. ‘Is your relationship with them?’