The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina left an urban core populous with unique experience dealing with international non-governmental organizations (NGO’s). The third sector in the former and current Yugoslavia lacks sustainable practice and management. International organizations were more anxious to fund local initiatives than to find good information about the situation on the ground. New unsustainable yet well-financed initiatives were created, which removed human resources from competing and more sustainable initiatives, and created a social welfare loss in the third sector. Three organizations working in urban settings will be discussed:
v Youth House Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina working with youth aged 5-18.
v Youth Club 96, Gornji Vakuf, Bosnia and Herzegovina working with former soldiers 18-30.
v Center for Nonviolent Conflict Resolution Nis, Yugoslavia dealing with a mixed group of member’s aged 16-35.
The organizations and urban settings described below cannot easily be compared to the average western urban experience. In societies that have not experience warfare rates of 10 percent for depression and 8 percent for PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) would be considered troublesome[i]. The point being not only that the society under stress has more depressed people, but also that these depressed individuals have a larger peer group. The affects of war are just beginning to be understood in a scientific manner and research is still at an early stage. In Bosnia and Herzegovina there are currently numerous research projects under way trying to document the extent of “transition problems.” Most in the field agree about one thing: a return to the status quo cannot be achieved in the short term. How long? How costly? In what ways? What are the consequences? These are the questions that still need to be answered. Currently the United Nations has determined that they need to scale back their original goals of creating a multi-ethnic state in Kosovo in the short-term. The stated priority of the responsible body for the international protectorate is to simply stop them from killing each other. Currently less than half of the requested 6,000 UN police force has arrived. KFOR (the acronym for the peace keeping force) has been formulated from the experience of UNPROFOR, IFOR and SFOR in Bosnia and the Dayton Peace Agreement, the supposed great success story of American foreign policy in 1995. As Hoffmann states “It is difficult to interpret Dayton as being more than a construction aimed at giving the Clinton administration a “victory” that would last until the 1996 election-whatever happens afterwards-…”[ii]
No comments:
Post a Comment