Every man needs to live in a peaceful environment. But, when it comes to that he had to act peacefully he simply can’t, because it seems like it isn’t in his nature. Fight with someone it’s actually really easy, but when you have to reconcile that’s the spot when problems begin.
Word “reconciliation” is synonym for peace. Ironically, that’s also the word which was the reason for so many arguments and fights. Extremely dangerous region for mentioning this world is Balkan. In this part of world people like to live in the past. What is happening now it’s far less important than what happened 10, 20 or 50 years ago. And why it’s like that will remain a mystery. But, it isn’t an issue to find the way to change that kind of people who are captured in specific moment of time, because that will be “tilting at windmills”, a biggest problem is finding a way to remove the burden of past that new generations, their son, daughters and grandchildren carried around. We are youth of this country and residents of this region need stop thinking what happened and use events from past to prevent that happened again and create brighter future together.
Of course there are a lot of ordinary people that already doing something about that. By ordinary I mean people that don’t have political power or so much influence on masses like NGO’s. In last 5 years there was a lot of talking about human rights and reconciliation through different seminars, training courses and projects and that made huge step forward in facing the past and moving forward. But, it still isn’t enough, because that includes only people who are interested in that topic. If we really want to make progress we need to include and educate people who are not into that like our classmates, siblings, colleagues etc. So I was thinking for a long time how can I contribute to the reconciliation as individual. To be honest, now I can do very little by talking about that in my environment and do some workshops with that topic, educating kids from school. But, I’m working on that and I hope that I’ll be on some place where I will have enough power to make a much more about reconciliation. Idea that I have is based on my own experience. I was always supporter of the thought that you can’t talk about some nation in general and judge people just according to their nationality. That’s probably because I get trough so many different exchanges and met so many people from different regions and countries which have nothing in common with stereotypes and prejudice. But, unfortunately not everyone have a chance to meet other cultures and spend couple days with people from different countries and get know them better. So according to that I have an idea of giving a chance to people, young people precisely while they are still in school to met their peers from other Balkan countries trough student exchanges program.
Exchange program means that every year 20-30 students from final year of primary school or first year of high school from all over the Serbia will be exchanged with students same ages from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina or Kosovo. Also they will be accommodated to families of those students from different country for week. But, program will also include that next year those students who went to exchange should be host, for those where they were accommodated. This is a most easy and effective way to get familiar with other culture and nation. There are a lot of benefits of this kind of education and importance for reconciliation between Balkan people. First of all, the reason why I said young people, that’s because it’s easier to change mind and built new ways of looking of past events to young than to people which was witnesses of all of that. Young people easier can pass through things which happened in time where they are not even born, so that’s the main reason why reconciliation process must begin with them. The second thing is that media spread false information and people can’t find out the true if they don’t see how things stand in reality. So true exchanges youth will see how they peers live, how they spend their free time and figure out that even they are coming from different cultures they are similar to each other.
Of course, I can only hope that one day I’ll be able to put this in practice, but what can I do as a youth reconciliation ambassador is that I can join forces and cooperate with youth from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Croatia and give initiative and lobby to those who are that kind of position to do that. Every step is important, even when it’s a little. And every individual contribute is valuable, because if we stop thinking that our part in reconciliation process is not important we will never make a progress.
