Balkan Activities

JCCP’s Balkan office is located in the Macedonian capital of Skopje and since February 2009 JCCP has been implementing its ‘Promoting Social Cohesion’ project in Southern Serbian city of Bujanovac. The project focuses on peace promotion among Serb, Albanian and Roma school children with a view to creating a mutual understanding of one another.

The medium-sized city of Bujanovac is home to a population of 4,300,000, of whom 55% are Albanian, 34% are Serbs and 9% are Roma. Although their living areas are not segregated, there is very little opportunity for communication among the different ethnic groups. JCCP is working together with the Public Health Service to organize a number of cleaning projects, workshops and painting teamwork in order to promote understanding among school children at grass-roots level with a view to creating stability in the region and relieving the strained situation between the three groups.

After successfully promoting reconciliation among primary schoolchildren in Southern Serbia in 2009, JCCP has launched a new project for supporting peace in the ethnically tense city of Struga, Macedonia. The project hopes to promote mutual understanding among ethnically diverse students of four primary schools in the region through workshops, and teamwork painting and cleaning.

Struga is located in Southern Macedonia, and it has an ethnic composition of 57% Albanian, 32% Macedonian and 6% Turkish. Even though all citizens share the same nationality, different ethnic groups speak different languages and follow different religions. In primary schools, students are segregated by their mother tongue and religion, and having almost no relations with other ethnic groups until the time they enter the only high school in town. JCCP wishes to promote interaction among kids, hoping it will contribute for mutual ethnic tolerance and understanding among different cultures in the future.

Between 1991 and 2000 the Balkans were subject to devastating wars, often described as Europe’s deadliest conflicts since World War II. Former Yugoslavia consisted of Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro. Slovenia and Croatia desired independence from the Yugoslav Federation, while Serbia aimed to strengthen federal authority, which gave rise to intensified collisions. The civil war which followed gave birth to mass war crimes and ethnic cleansing, resulting in an incredible loss of lives. Despite that the conflict is now over, there is still wide-spread tension between the various ethnic groups.