Nachricht Nummer : 97
Übertragungszeit : 3 min 54 sec
Nachricht von    : WAM@ZAMIR-ZG.ZER.sub.org
Betrifft         : Zagreb Diary 16 May, 1993
Erstellungsdatum : 17.05.1993 12:08:00 S+2

Realname: Wam Kat

Zagreb Diary 16 May, 1993

Dobar Dan,

In principle I should have been in the Netherlands at this moment, I 
promised my children and friends to visit them and do some fund-raising at 
the side line. But as you can see I am still in Zagreb and I have told my 
friends that I wouldn't come as long as the situation here is as unclear as it 
is, I simply can't imagine myself in the Netherlands, when the possibility is 
so high that any moment the military intervention can start and I want to 
here when that is happening.

Especially fund-raising is rather necessary at the moment since part of our 
stress at this moment in time. It looks a bit if the whole world is waiting until 
the situation becomes again a little bit more clear. Of course I can imagine 
this feeling of being afraid for helping the "wrong" people, although I have 
the feeling that victims are never "wrong".

Also the idea that help for Croatia is not necessary anymore is not true, you 
hear often this opinion the war is over in Croatia, now all help should go to 
BiH. Remember that within Croatia there are still nearly 700.000 or more 
refugees and displaced people, even when the Croatian government has 
made new guidelines and the amount of refugees and displaced people 
became a lot less, without anybody leaving the country by the way, still one 
out of every 9th persons is displaced or refugee. 

Croatia is also a country on the edge of total bankruptcy, two days ago a 
new bank note came on the market, the 10.000 HDR, this shows that the 
inflation is still going on, so the state is absolute not capable to take care of 
that problem. In fact I am still very much in favour that all care and 
responsibility should be taken over by International organisations, like 
UNHCR, but that is another story.

But as long as there are refugee camps in Croatia were the elderly people 
have to sleep in shifts, because of the fact that there are not enough beds, 
and were we have to provide milk and fruit in camps to be sure that there is 
no mall nutrition, as long as each pill which comes via NeXus and other 
international organisations contacts into the country immediately is been 
used and is simply otherwise not available help for people in Croatia is 
needed. 

Of course the stories are told, and often true that there are warehouses 
around the country were food and supplies are stock piling and not been 
distributed, that is more a problem from bad management and logistic than 
a fact that materials are not needed.

Also Croatia is a country in transmission from a kind of Eastern European 
Socialist economy to a West European capitalist economy and that is not as 
easy as it may sound.  During this process a lot of people which are now 
more or less employed will loose there jobs, since there wouldn't be any 
work for them anymore, as there wasn't in reality work for them in the past. 
They were only employed often to be there. And if Croatia as state will be 
able to support all those new unemployed is an very open question.
 
The situation of foreign Humanitarian organisations is getting harder, now 
the state is getting better organised and the chaos from the beginning is 
slowly over, not yet, but it is getting better, our position is less flexible than 
in the beginning. Messages coming out of UNHCR are also pointing that 
out. More and more rules will come to get a governmental grip on the 
thousands of private bigger and smaller initiatives. But we will see, it means 
for me that all this organisations are more and more stressed to co-operate 
better. 

In my daily telephone calls with Citluk it became clear again that the fights in 
Mostar are far from over. It reminds me a talk I had in January with 
somebody of the local Merhamet (the local Muslim aid organisation, a little 
bit like Caritas) and we visit the Muslim refugee centres in the town, which 
were under terrible conditions (no heating, hardly no windows, broken 
toilets, etc.). We offered him to help him with rebuilding activities, like we 
have done in Posusje and organising activities for the children and women. 
He reacted that we had to wait with it until it was absolute sure that there 
wouldn't be any shelling anymore from the mountain with the television 
tower (the "Chetnik" positions). At that moment we didn't thought that the 
danger would be able to come from inside the city. At least we didn't talk 
about it.

It is Sunday today and I have the time to spend some more time on the 
networking computer, I am proud on our system it start to get really used, 
more and more groups within Croatia starts to see the impact of this virtual 
world. And we start to realise that we are not putting our information in a big 
black hole. Hopefully we will be able to install a bigger harddisk soon and 
start to link up our system with already existing Fide systems around the 
country.

Talking about Email and electronic networking I remember the story which 
was told to me when I started to ask around why the university computer 
weren't represented much on the International computer nets. Somebody 
told me that in the beginning of the war a lot of people from outside tried to 
log into the computers in Croatia and that some people from here started to 
write messages on the international net, signed with Franjo Tudjman and 
that on that moment all the International lines were cut. At the moment they 
are re-established, but as all of you can see it is not really used a lot. 

Bok I Mir from Zagreb,

							Wam


PS Yesterday I wrote something about Tudjman, what could be wrong 
interpreted. The television is *not* referring to him as "father of all Croats", 
that was I line I quoted from an Indian chief, who visit Croatian about half a 
year ago. What I wanted to say was that if the news want to say something 
about Tudjman, they always say "Doctora Franjo Tudjmana" and the using 
of that title surprised me, in my country we are not so use to that.
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