"In Mostar and Kosovo, civilians welcomed Spanish soldiers with relief"

When I went to the Balkans I wanted to know from a historical perspective how they had gotten into this situation. What had swept them into war? One day, while discussing this with a fellow soldier he told me that there was a Masters in Conflict Resolution. I got information through our Personnel Support Office in our barracks and they informed me that the Catalan government, through the Department of Institutional Relations and Participation (Armed Forces Relations), had subsidies for studying the Masters in Conflict Resolution. I decided to pursue it and completed the programme last year. Currently, several of my companions are also studying it. The Masters is wide-ranging and interesting. It aims to look beyond the causes of a conflict; it attempts to understand it, and through this understanding, transform it. Conflict is something that is out there, that exists, that may even be positive; conflict is innate to man, to humanity. People associate the word conflict with something negative, but this need not be so, if we know how to handle it. Conflict exists when there are two people with different opinions, another thing is to try to avoid that this conflict comes to confrontation or violence. This definition of conflict was one of the things that surprised me the most at first. The Masters has many interesting aspects, for instance, online contact with many opinions, ways of thinking, even those conflicting with yours, which are eye-opening in terms of new points of view. I would definitely do it again. The Masters is organised in modules. During the first year you study subjects that are more general such as mediation and conflict resolution, or educational criteria for conflict management, while in the second year they are more specific and cover labour conflicts, conflicts between organisations, international conflicts, etc. The syllabus is very extensive. In addition, at the end you have to do a paper based on what you have studied and in which you must put into practice what you have learned. It was great. Some of them live and work in countries with longstanding conflicts, and their contributions are very enriching. I recall an individual who told of how they had lost a family member in Columbia. This contribution was very important, because it spoke of, for example, our ability to forget. When we speak about conflict, the problems at root are different depending on the place as well as the way of looking at them, but everything has a common thread. There is always the need for dialogue, empathy, putting yourself in the place of the other... this is the same all over; this was made clear by the experiences contributed by each individual. The truth is that it is difficult to contribute, because you are inside a structure, occupying a specific position. In Mostar and Kosovo, my position was related to logistics. What you can do is try to see things in another way and put yourself in the place of those who are suffering directly from the conflict. But to have an influence is harder. Moreover, language is a barrier, and you’re not always mixing with the population, there’s not always physical contact. Our CIMIC (Civil-Military Cooperation) teams do come into contact with the inhabitants of a place to find out how they can help them and administer this aid, but not from a logistical point of view, since you are basically in an office handling the movement of personnel stationed there, their vehicles, fuel, etc. To get to know the country a bit, I went there on vacation. Visiting Sarajevo with a Serbian interpreter had a profound impact on me, because in his explanations I could feel the pain brought about by the situation in which they found themselves. We visited the Olympic Village, where the 1984 winter games were held, which is on a hill, and the area surrounding the sports installations is a cemetery. It’s shocking to see that, what barbarity. All you could see were graves. I think they were relieved. At least in certain situations, above all when their safety depended on our presence there. When Spanish soldiers go into areas in conflict, they usually have good relations with the locals, perhaps because of our open nature. Our soldiers know where they are going and for what reason and, like the rest of the Spanish people, are people with a sense of solidarity who are endowed with great humanity that they demonstrate in their work. What I have seen is a great desire to help. This might be one of the factors that made me study the Masters. In Bosnia, I was surprised to find that aid can be positive, but is sometimes negative. Aid is given compulsively, everybody wants to help and they do so in the first way that occurs to them, without considering the real needs of those living there, without asking them, without taking them into account. What they need most is to help themselves. It is really hard to know and very easy to get things wrong. The work lies in the type of aid these people receive. For instance, the survivors of a conflict need to try the authorities who ran the war and are still present there and replace them with politicians that care about the people. This is a little more complicated than helping with material and temporary aspects. There is also aid to women, who suffer the violence in triplicate: first because of the war itself, then to have been used, in many instances, as an instrument of war (rape, humiliation...), once the war is over it turns out that they have lost their sons and husbands and once again suffer the consequences of being the economic motor, something that maybe they hadn’t done until then. Another subject related to aid is education, but in a broad sense of the word. Education of society, of the media, guilty to a great extent of absolute atrocities, because many times hatred was nourished through the media; political education for democracy, because these are countries that recently came out of a dictatorship (the Yugoslavia of Tito). Thus, all of these things are more important than temporary economic assistance. It depends on the type of conflict in question and how it is handled. In the case of the Balkans, I fear generations will have to pass. In 1992 the international community was not prepared for the circumstances and considered a solution to the conflict in terms of a war between ethnic groups; this was a very serious mistake. The confrontation between ethnic groups was the result of the war, not its cause. Yet, the Dayton Agreement did nothing other than legitimise those who brought about the war. Now we see the appearance of a new state recognised by the international community, and run by the same individuals who carried out the war and who employed ethnic cleansing. I believe in the clash between rich and poor. When civilizations clash it is because one is opulent and the other lacking in everything. This clash is born from need, but does not necessarily have to be a cultural clash. I believe in cultural mixing, from which another, richer and broader culture, will be born. Some people take refuge in cultural identity as a kind of protection from the unknown, and they interpret everything that comes from outside as an attack against their identity. This is a characteristic of certain nationalisms. It is what happened in Bosnia and it led to the partitioning of territory in terms of ethnic groupings, and the same thing occurred in Kosovo, which is now an ethnic state.