LOJA in Tetovo

My next meeting was with LOJA in Tetovo. They were having a German Film fest and invited me to watch the film fest as well as interview them. Loja mean games in Albanian, and traces it back to how their NGO got started. Essentially they help with video production for cross cultural discussion. There are 7 people who work at the NGO, 5 of who are local in Tetovo, and one is from Germany (not sure who the other person is, just realized that it only added up to six).

In 1999, while they were directing and rehearsing a play and they could see all of the refugees from the Kosovo crisis. (Need some reminding on what exactly happened? Click here.) The people who later formed LOJA, decided to become involved and to do something for the kids who were suffering. They were playing games to help the kids forget what they had seen. After the refugee camp was moved, they decided to continue the work. They were being told that there was peace, but the founders kept seeing a different story on the ground. They wanted to help prevent a crisis situation from developing. So they decided to create an NGO to help maintain the change. In 2001, they felt the changes in the ethnic group before the tension escalated. Their target community is the youth, because they are easier to change when shown the benefits of cooperation. Where LOJA is known (such as in Tetovo) the community is very responsive to their efforts, but they face resistance from other communities.

From 2000-2004 they worked on the Babylon projects, whom they shared office space with.These were the first attempts in non-formal intervention. It is different in a post-conflict society than a society before the conflict. They are trying to reach their aims and help groups be resistant to extremists. But their work can be destroyed within hours. They are trying to give messages that will stick through and after the fights that people are going to have. They try to bring people together who share things in common, rather than what separates them. (They are teachers/journalists/workers rather than Albanian or Macedonian.) Part of this cooperation involved creating the following video:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/r3muc80-Poo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Currently, they run 4-5 projects per month and are the only ethnically mixed organization in MK. There are other organizations that have both ethnicity’s (or all) but they are either All Albanians or Macedonians in higher positions, with the opposite in lower positions. At LOJA both Macedonians and Albanians are equal.  They work mainly with culture. When I talked to them in October, they had 4 projects they were working on:

1. extra-circular activities for future teachers. This one has been running for 4 years. They provide training and direct workshops. LOJA also runs small pilot projects with different ethnic groups.
2. Robert Bauch Tifgen (possible spelling errors, because I could not find anything related to many different spellings of this name) cultural activities, such as with the media to try to create different resources.
3. Franco-German youth exchange as a resource center for South Eastern Europe
4. In cooperation with a Swiss group- network of participation with cultural memories. To provide different perceptions of history. Bring reasons why to cooperate and to do so through art.

LOJA is often critical towards the governments view of civil society (in this case, I mean the real government not the party in power). Mike (my contact) believes that it is more complicated due to the mixed groups, than the government gives on. There is a difference between the government’s discourse vs. the actuality on the ground. The government/party in power believes that if you are not for this particular government, then you are against it.

LOJA has never gotten any money from the government, and they are dependent on external funds. They are now able to self finance. They often offer training abroad for training (and they get some extra salary out of it). They have been working in the public sector for 9 years, yet they are the only cinema in Tetovo. There is no public cinema in Tetovo. In addition, the government is in charge of cleaning up the trash on the streets. (In MK, they have big trash containers on the street and everyone brings their trash to these like they would a big dumpster in the US. Sometimes these are over-flowing.) Right in front of LOJA, there is one of these set of trash cans. Usually it is over flowing, and they do not clean it up until the day after any LOJA event. LOJA thinks this is on purpose.

There are no big cultural events in Tetovo, none sponsored by the municipality even with partial support. When the municipality does support something, no one sees where it goes, it is suggested that sometimes that it lines the pockets of the officials, or fictive projects. Mike states that the government is discriminatory towards non ethnic Macedonians. The state will enforce laws, only the negative ones. Mike claims that the government needs external support to change the laws and how they are enforced. Further, Mike claims, the government is doing very little to help bridge the gap ethnicities, sometimes they even cause the problems. Thus, this part of the government’s job is left in the hands of civil society and international organizations.

When the 2001 crisis occurred, the Ohrid agreement ignored the basic problems. The current government, Mike alleges, will miss the opportunity afforded by this agreement if they continue on the same path. While in theory, the framework has been implemented, the policing infrastructure has not been fully changed due to problems in finances.

After the interview, we attended a movie event sponsored by the German Embassy. It was the first movie of the week long event. They had translated the German into both Albanian and Macedonian. They also had the German Ambassador’s speech translated by different women into both Albanian and Macedonian. They are very careful to have both ethnicities represented. After the movie, they had a small reception with food and juice provided. Many people mingled, but it did appear that they were in separate friend groups.

“My fear,” Mike finished with, “intuition, suspicion tells me that this government will break Macedonia so it makes no sense.”

Civil Society and Citizenship

Now we turn to more of the research I began about the civil society sector! I know it took awhile, but remember at first I wanted to focus on the women’s NGOs, so this would have been background to a women’s rights focus. That or I probably didn’t discover the book until later. I find it best to start off with a definition of civil society, for I find it is hard to explain to those who are not sure what it is already. I often find myself relying on examples alone. “You know The Red Cross? Amnesty International? National Organization of Women? THOSE are NGOs.” In comes Lester Salamon with the save: “they are all organizations that operate outside the state apparatus, that do not distribute profits, and that citizens are free to join or not join to pursue common purposes” (Salamon et al, xvii). In addition there are 5 characteristics that are required of civil society organizations (Salamon et al, 3-4):

1. organizations: they have an institutional presence and structure
2. private: they are institutions separate from the state.
3. non-profit distributing: they do not return profits to their managers or to a set of owners
4. self governing:  they are fundamentally in control of their own affairs
5. voluntary: membership in them is not legally required and they attract some level of voluntary contribution of time or money

The importance of the civil society sector has began to be seen as “strategically important participants in this search for a ‘middle way’ between sole reliance on the market and sole reliance on the state that now seems to be increasingly underway” (Salomon et al, 5). There is a general acceptance that the government can not serve all of the needs of its citizens, thus the civil society sector is beginning to bridge that gap between public and private services. The civil society sector is also considered a critical part of a democratic society.

Part of being part of a member of a democratic society is the right of citizenship. Citizenship can define “the limits of state power and where a civil society or the private sphere of free individuals begin” (Yuval-Davis & Werbner, 2). In fact, democratic citizenship maintains the right to be different. Yet, while allowing different parties to emerge, and being a part of the nation, each person has a different view of citizenship because citizenship encapsulates specific, historically inflected, cultural and social assumptions about similarity and difference” (Yuval-Davis & Werber, 3). Further, Yuval-Davis and Werber argue that citizenship is at the intersection of the state, civil society and an individual intersect.

But for me? The best quote I have found is this: Unlike nationalism, which grounds itself in past myths of common origin or culture, citizenship raises its eyes towards the future to common destinies” (Yuval-Davis & Werber, 8).

Nira Yuval-Davis & Pnina Werbner, “Women & the New Discourse of Citizenship,” in Women, Citizen & Difference, 1-38, ed by Nira Yuval-Davis and Prina Werber. London: Zed Books, 1999.

global Civil Society Dimensions of the Non-Profit sector, ed Lester Slamon, Helmut Anheier, Regina List, Stefan Toepler, S. Wojciech Sokolowski and Associates. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, 1999.

“Preface”

“Civil Society in Comparitive Perspective” 3-39

Transitions and Gender

The next few articles that I looked at were about feminism and women’s rights in the transitioning cultures of Eastern Europe/the Balkans. Part of this transition includes the creation of a national myth of heritage. In most of these myths women were to play a crucial role in the extreme nationalism that was helpful to the disintegration of both Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The build up of one nationality often focused on women ‘doing what nature intended and having babies’! Dasa Duhacek believes that the state uses gender or women in at least three different ways:

1. changing abortion laws as a way of nation building: In communist times there was a relaxed abortion policy  allowing women to receive aborts with fewer questions. It was also not looked down upon or thought of as a serious problem. However, newer nations would often change their abortion policy so that it became harder for women to access these services. Some politicians even stated that it was to help bring up the birthrate of the population so that they could have more ethnic citizens. Some states, it has been accused, went a step further and made it more difficult in general and then made it easier for the “wrong” ethnicity to access abortion services.
2. reproduction as a function of nation and motherhood: This idea is that if you do not have children and many of them you are trying to kill the state (and ethnicity). Thus women should not work so they can focus on creating new life and blood for the country. Women were seen as the caretakers of the young and thus the nation. They did this by influencing the young children’s thought towards the correct (state and party) line. When you had children you were helping to support the nation by giving it many more new citizens.
3. rape as a way of politics:This is sadly the easiest to explain. Rape was used not only as a means of war and a weapon in the Balkan conflicts, but also after the war when they were setting up their societies. Rape was not fully decriminalized, but not punished as harshly as before. Women faced the same pressures in these areas as they did else where: if you dress like a slut, then obviously you were asking to get raped. (For a modern take on these comments see: Wikipedia on Slut Walk for the links and a quick summary)

In socialist/communist times (Yugoslavia was a communist state, but not connected with the USSR. They had more political freedom than the USSR and access to western goods.) there was an official “equality paradigm,” where you were not to consider gender. Officially the people were genderless (except for when it came to maternity leave and women working less ‘safe’ jobs where they were given laxer treatment). The new ideology of the state (usually based in a western-conservative ideology of religion) was “crucially based on the strategy of retraditionalization of women’s identities, their social roles and symbolic representations” (Papic, 122). Yet it is not correct to expect the state to willingly give up these gendered roles that it helped to create when it serves the government well in their nationalist rhetoric as well as their own personal beliefs. Institutions were built upon these hierarchies and their inherent inequality (Ivekovic, 57). To change these views meant that institutions would have to be changed, and this would harm whoever was currently in power at the time, thus no one was willing to do so, and they remain unwilling.




Zarana Papic, “Women in Serbia: Post-Communism, War & Nationalist Mutations,” in Gender & identity: Theories from &/or on South East Europe, ed by Jelisaveta Blagojevic, Katerina Kolozova, Svetlana Slapsak. (Belgrade Women’s Studies & Gender Research/Athena, 2006).

Dasa Duhacek, “Gender Perspective on Political Identies in Yugoslavia,” in Gender & identity: Theories from &/or on South East Europe, ed by Jelisaveta Blagojevic, Katerina Kolozova, Svetlana Slapsa, 297-319. (Belgrade Women’s Studies & Gender Research/Athena, 2006).