A MONTH OF PEACE MESSAGES

Violence caused by the appearance of militant Albanian extremists, has been characterizing our reality for over two months, pushing us into a military conflict followed by an emphasized polarization of multi-ethnic relations, new eruptions of hatred, non-confidence, separation...

Unfortunately, we live in a reality of conflicts, tanks, bombs, snipers, targets, deaths and wounds, evils from which civilians suffered, too. It will be also noted for the great civic activity and the cry for peace. Most of the Macedonian citizen associations were unanimous in their determination for peace and non-violence, mutual respect among all its citizens and finding democratic solutions to all the problems. Because of the actual condition, many citizen associations’ activities were delayed. A number of seminars, conferences, lectures, projects that would have meant dignifying, moving forward, ennobling the spirit, a progress of democratic processes, didn’t take place. However, the citizen associations participated in many activities which called for peace and non-violence, for finding solutions through dialogue and not through targets, which demonstrated that citizen associations are the progressive locomotive of our society. They showed that the efforts for building a democratic society in the past ten years in Macedonia were not futile-brick by brick we built the basis on which a democratic country can be set upon.
Apart from the peace activities of the citizen associations, in this second number of “Civic World”, we would like to inform you about an important but insufficiently developed segment of our future democratic country-cooperation among citizen associations and the business sector. We are going to demonstrate using three positive examples, of the factory “Evropa”, “Komuna” and cement factory “Usje”, how these two sectors- non-governmental and business, can meet each other’s needs.
“Evropa” received new, “ecology” production line thanks to a non-governmental organization; last year, as well as this year, “Usje” provided large financial means for the support of citizens and citizen associations, and “Komuna” raised an initiative for a wide civic activity, which means cleaner city, less tree-cutting and economic saving, and it called for help and cooperation from non-governmental organizations and all citizens.
I believe that there will be more such positive examples and the following numbers of “Civic World” will welcome all information of that kind. I hope that such positive examples of cooperation will develop in parallel to the third sector of our society, that is, the governmental, and the best cooperation would be the “trilateral”-among the governmental, non-governmental and business sector.
 What we promote in this number is the announcement of the debates at the open link on our web-site. For a start, we raise the issue of lobbying. Do Macedonian associations lobby? How do they do it? Are they aware that they lobby at all, or translated in “our” terms, they make use of their “connections”, friendships, contacts, etc. to accomplish a certain goal? Lobbying, of course, includes all that, but also many other things, such as many techniques and methods that are not practiced in our country. We launch the opinions of four people active in the non-governmental sector as a provocation to all of you. We truly hope that the subject is provocative enough and that we will have a good discussion on our web-site.  The debate will be published in the next number of “Civic World” and we will announce the issue for a following debate. At the same time we invite you to give your suggestions on the issues to be included in our small virtual debates.
In this number we also present some of the publications that came out from the citizen associations.
The fact that the publishing activity coming from our sector increases is quite encouraging.  There are bulletins, newspapers, translated books, collection, etc. It all means enrichment of the Macedonian literary fund and publishing activity, which, in comparison to other countries in the region is rather poor.
We present to you “Toleranca”, an association from Struga and the Swedish foundation “Kvinna Till Kvinna”, as well as several activities that, somehow, during the month of the crisis managed to take place. We announce a month full of activities that we hope will be held in peace.
Marijana Ivanova