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The idea of "Dialogues of Peace" was born in the October 2000, following a first project of “training and deployment of volunteers in Kossovo”, organised by Associazione per la Pace and financed by Municipality of Naples, after the bombing of Kossovo by the NATO army.
After a training course, I selected six volunteers that spent one month in the ICS – Italian Consortium of Solidarity centres in Kossovo, working with people of different ethnicity: Serbs and Albanian in the divided town of Mitrovica; Roma in the refugee camp of Plementina near Pristina; Gorani in the village of Restelica, in the deep south of the region.
After this first experience, we decided to follow the situation in Mitrovica, as a symbol and cross-road of ethnic division in Kossovo. River Ibar was, and still is, the border line in the town and in the whole country: in the north there is the Serbian community and in the south the Albanians. Roma people, with their houses in the south destroyed during the war, were displaced - and still they are – in the refugee camps in the north of the region. In such a condition on the field, we have walked beside local civil society through a reconciliation process that nowadays looks difficult and sometime unrealizable. Nevertheless, in these years we have set up the first inter-ethnic activities, with the involvement of primary schools, and the creation of the Association for Peace Kosov@, gathering together our local staff, made by three different representatives: Serbian, Albanian and Roma.
Associazione per la Pace is still working on this project, while in the last few years I tried – in collaboration with Centro Studi Difesa Civile - to apply the Mitrovica’s experience to other conflict areas: Cyprus and Georgia. In the following pages I would like to present these three projects. |
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