Volunteers Try to Make Peace in Bosnia Stick

MONTPELIER, VT. -- Sometimes at night as grenades boomed across the front lines in Bosnia, voices flitted back and forth, staccato bursts of humanity crackling from ham radios. Muslims talked to Serbs, and Serbs to Croats, about seemingly mundane matters: rock music, the price of coffee, the moon rising on a clear night.

'This is the stuff you start out with when you're trying to bridge a huge chasm with people who are shooting at you," said Gary Shapiro, a Vermonter whose volunteer organization helped arrange the radio contact. Conversation between ordinary people, Shapiro argues, is key to solving the problem Bosnians face now that the 4 1/2- year war has ended: people living together peacefully. And so, from a small office in Montpelier, a group of idealists-- including Shapiro and another full-time staffer who works without pay-- is taking on the daunting task of making peace stick.

Shapiro's organization, called Conflict Resolution Catalysts, has sent 15 volunteers to the former Yugoslavia since 1995. Six more volunteers, who must pay for their trip and who are asked to stay at least two months, will go in September.

So far, volunteers have opened a community center in Serb-controlled Banja Luka that welcomes people of all ethnic backgrounds. Others produced a radio show in Sarajevo to which listeners could call in with their problems. They also ferried taped messages between friends who lived on opposite sides of the front lines. Now volunteers are preparing to train dozens of Bosnians to resolve conflicts in their neighborhoods nonviolently.

"We're trying to fill a gap that exists in the Dayton agreement, which is a very top-down traditional type of agreement," said Bruce Hemmer, a 28-year-old volunteer from Charlottesville, Va., who will fly to Bosnia next month.

Still, in a country ruled by a Communist regime almost until the war began, some tenets of conflict resolution -- which tries to bring together ordinary citizens from all sides-are foreign. "It's a different culture, a different history," says Shapiro, who has traveled to the former Yugoslavia seven times in three years.

The group's biggest success, Shapiro says, is the Banja Luka community center, which opened in 1995. Many of its programs target children, with volunteers teaching English and art. Next month, volunteers plan to start a radio station for young people. Its programming will include a call-in show moderated by a clinical psychologist. "One of the things that really stick out is the sense of loss over their childhood being taken away," says project coordinator John Crownover, a 29-year-old from Fairfax, Va. "They say, 'We have new friends now, but there's nothing like a friend you grew up with.'"

Crownover finds comfort in small victories. One day last week, about 30 young people -- Serbs, Croats, and Muslims -- sat on the grass outside the center and sang Bosnian folk songs they had learned as children. It was a simple act, but a meaningful one: During the war, even the music had become politicized. "It was almost like the taboo had been broken," he said.

In September Hemmer, who has a master's degree in international relations, plans to open a second community center in Ilidza, a suburb if Sarajevo controlled by Serbs during the war. Tensions run high: although two-thirds of the population is Serb, the predominantly Muslim government now controls the town.

"The success of Serbs and Muslims being able to live in those areas is largely going to determine whether those groups can live together anywhere," Shapiro said.

Conflict Resolution Catalysts trains its volunteers to be impartial to all Bosnians. That principle sometimes vexes other volunteer groups; Shapiro, for instance, has been called an agent for Serb fascists. Volunteers are trained to listen to the Serbs, rather than debate history with them.

"If you look at the statistics, of course, there have been more Muslims killed," Shapiro said. "But when you're with the ordinary Serb in Banja Luka and they tell you how much they've suffered, you cannot say, 'You haven't suffered as much as the Muslims. What are you complaining about?'"

Shapiro founded Conflict Resolution Catalysts in 1987, after a visit to the Soviet Union convinced him that the country, still in the throes of Communism, needed more grass-roots activism. His group linked organizations in the Soviet Union with the professionals who had similar interests in the United States. It was a new kind of political activism for Shapiro, a former botanist and tour guide who studied conflict resolution at Montpelier's Woodbury College. His group still struggles to raise money through grants and donations. Last year it brought in $71,000, a third of what it had hoped.

"In earlier years I was into more common political activism, where you pick up a cause, protesting against something," Shapiro said. "But I began to feel like the us-versus-them approach was not effective."

When the war broke out in Yugoslavia in 1991, Shapiro wanted to help. Like many people he was reminded of the Holocaust, in which some of his own relatives died. Shapiro first visited the region in 1993 with a busload of peace activists headed for Mostar, an ancient city on the emerald-green Neretva River nearly destroyed by brutal fighting between Croats and Muslims. As the bus snaked through the small villages of Herzegovina, its passengers discussed what to do if the bus was fired upon. They learned how to treat wounds, and they piled their backpacks along the windows for flimsy protection.

Shapiro returned safely from Mostar. A few months later he went to Sarajevo and began talking to locals about setting up a community center in the city, which was being shelled by the Serbs. During another trip, in November 1995, Shapiro was celebrating a religious holiday with friends in Banja Luka when news came over the radio that the Dayton peace agreement had been signed. "People applauded and cheered and hugged each other," Shapiro said. "I was crying. It was hard to believe the nightmare was finally ending."

The war was over. But as Shapiro noted, the peace was just beginning.