Croatian Exhibition Celebrates ‘Rebels for Peace’

The 'Faces of Resistance' exhibition, which pays tribute to people who took a stand against violence during turbulent periods of Croatia's history, opened on Wednesday in Vukovar.

"In the exhibition, we celebrate the contribution of peacemakers and all those who rebelled against violence, not only during 1991 to 1995, or the 'Homeland war'," Vesna Terselic from Documenta, an NGO that addresses 1990s war issues, said at the opening of the exhibition.

"You can also find memories from some of the actors of the national liberation struggle [WWII anti-fascist resistance movement]," Terselic added.

The display at Vukovar's city museum contains photographs and descriptions of people who contributed to the struggle against violence in Croatia and in the Balkan region and activists who preserved the memory of the victims of the 1990s war, as well as pictures of some peaceful demonstrations.

One of the 'faces of resistance' featured at exhibition is Croatian journalist Sinisa Glavasevic who reported from besieged Vukovar until he was seized and killed when the town fell in 1991.

Another is Diana Budisavljevic, an Austrian married to a Croatian doctor who worked to save children from camps run by Croatia's Nazi-allied Ustasa regime during World War II.

The exhibition is part of a two-day programme entitled 'The EU as a Forgotten Peace Project?', organised by civil society groups to mark Croatia's six-month tenure of the rotating presidency of the European Union. The aim is to ask what can be done to make the EU actively work to build peace within and beyond its borders.

Symbolically, the event took place in Vukovar on the anniversary of the peaceful reintegration of Croatia's Eastern Slavonia region on January 15, 1998.