Abstract

Lazar Sestovic

The Role of NGO's in Making Common Kosovo Future

If you look back in the history of Balkan nations, itšs easy to see that very few generations of it enjoyed the peace. There are many reasons for that kind of bloody and destructive history; location ­ this is a crossroad for East and West, for North and South; different religions and cultures, etc. But the main reason, in my opinion, is the low level of education, and consequently the lack of vision and the lack of perception of reality.

Most of nations from Balkan are good examples how easy for autocrats is to manipulate with common people. On the other side if we think for a moment what could happened if only we had more open-minded, educated and tolerant people we will see that this region would be probably a part of EU so far. Unfortunately, both sides in Kosovo conflict, Serbs and Albanian, showed very little of these characteristics, and things to be worse, official institutions are showing almost no interest in improving the situation.

That is the reason why together with representatives of international organizations there must be a great role of NGOšs in establishing new way of living of these nations. NGOšs, probably mainly of local character, must patiently educate people, especially the young, what is democracy, coexistence, human rights, negotiations, tolerance, religion etc. Usually people here have very defective pictures of all these phenomena which characterize modern societies, and that is the main reason why politicians so often abuse them in order to rich some selfish goals.

NGOšs must introduce the common people with all trends in politics, culture and economics. We donšt need killings, destruction and nationalism in the era of European unification. Countries, which have been enemies for centuries now are moving borders away, they are adopting single currency and common defense system, and that is important to say to people.

It is meaningless to divide and fight since one day we will all together live in European Union.

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