Alexander Langer and the “Verona Forum for peace and reconciliation in the territory of former Yugoslavia“

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 started beside an inexorable desire for freedom, also a strong occurrence of nationalistic and ethnical attempts in the territories which shortly after got called Former Yugoslavia.

In May 1991 a Serbian intellectual group invited Alexander Langer, the leader of the group of the Greens in the European Parliament, for a „Caravan of Peace“ in Kosovo, and the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly invited him for an analogical event in November of the same year.

Out of this context emerged the idea, which Langer learned in his adolescent years in South Tyrol toned by bombs: to offer a table of dialog to all representatives from all regions of this territory, so that they can meet regularly, to bring forward proposals of solutions in circumstances where the warlords were not able to agree upon, and – also thanks to the International support – even infected by governments, parliaments and media.

In the first assembly in September 1992, it seemed to be a good omen, to give to this new net the name of the town, in which it was located and to call it „Verona Forum for peace and reconciliation in Former Yugoslavia“. Langer and the Austrian representative Marijana Grandits used all forces to bear a moderator, guarantee and an impact function.

With the very good frequented conferences in Verona (1992 and 1993), Strasbourg (1993), Vienna (1993), Bruxelles (1994), Paris (1994), then directly in Tuzla (1994), Skopje and Zagreb (1995) the forum got the only ring of relations in this territory, meanwhile in the contrary, ethnic cleansings and the war grow up.

On this website you can recover the spoors of this affected – on the end futile – work, which wanted to beat the war with non-violent arms of word and the innovations of new legal means, but unfortunately arrived too late: the International Criminal Court, an International Police Force and one from the UNO directed Civil Peace Workers, to protect at least the civilians before genocide and crime against humanity; a new minority convention, respecting the individual rights; the explicit support of the civil society and the forces of dialog.                    

On 26th of June in 1995, one month after the bomb attack which killed 71 youths in the interethnic Tuzla of the mayor Sélim Bešlagić and some days before the horrible massacre of Srebrenica happened, Alexander Langer went to handover to chiefs of States and Governments an appeal, signed of dozens of deputies: Let us do something to stop this war of ethnical conquest, because “Europe will either die or be reborn in Sarajevo”.