by Nick Chun
In light of the ethnic tensions that remained after the end of the Croatian War, a social worker worked in reconciliation and community-building to help youth form new ties, all while discovering new lessons for herself.
Diana Barrett learned about compassion as a teacher in Osijek, Croatia at the end of the war that wracked her home city. She made her career as a social worker.
It was 1991 in Croatia. A group of teens was spending the day at the tennis court when they heard a faint whistling sound, followed by a rumbling of the earth that confused them. Among them was Diana Barrett, who was 12 years old at the time. It was the first of many mortar strikes that would hit Osijek during the start of the Croatian War.
Following the Government of Croatia’s declaration of independence, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, responded with force in an effort to retain control of the country. A four-year conflict between the Croatian forces and the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) culminated in Croatia’s independence and gain of new territory.
For Diana, her experiences in Osijek during and after the Croatian War shaped her understanding of conflict and healing, eventually leading to work in reconciliation and community-building. The lessons learned from these experiences would continue to influence her thinking decades later in her career as a social worker.
Bullets and Mortars
Diana recalls life under Yugoslavia’s socialist regime as a time of frequent electricity shortages and stretches of day when power was unavailable. Goods such as coffee, chocolate, and bananas were difficult to find, as the country bought very few imports.
Still, she was like any other young girl, living with her mother, father, and grandmother, and having many friends to play with in the neighborhood.
In late March, the Croatian War began after calls for the country’s autonomy. And by November 1991, following hundreds of concerted mortar strikes targeting Osijek, all of her close friends had been evacuated, many fleeing to Serbia.
“I was a very stubborn twelve year old, and I didn’t want to leave my family,” she said.
Her father had built a house less than six months old before the bombardments began. The damage from the outbreak of the war is still visible on her family house to this day.
Diana’s school closed, leaving her plenty of time at home with little to do aside from watching the television or listening to the radio.
“On the TV, there was nothing other than news on what was being bombarded at the moment and how many mortars had fallen,” she said. “There was so much pain around me. War was the only thing that you talked and heard about. And the media was so powerful in telling us all Serbs were bad. I kind of started believing that.”
Teachers in Osijek began organizing a program for volunteer families outside the conflict zone to host a child. At first Diana wanted to stay with her family..
One night, she was curled up in the bathtub, the safest place of the house, as tank mortars struck.
“The detonations were so loud,” she said with eyes wide. “There was no electricity, and my ears began bleeding. That same night, three huge mortars hit the front of our house. All windows, doors, glass, and bricks were pulverized. My mother yelled at me to run to the basement. I was barefoot and walking over broken glass to get downstairs. It was no longer safe.”
After mortars struck her home, Diana joined the program and left
A New “Normal”
Dian left Osijek in November 1991 as mortar strikes peaked.
She found herself lined up in a school gymnasium at Samobor, a town outside of Zagreb, where students and host families were paired.
Here, Diana lived a relatively normal life despite the events occurring within Croatia and rising tensions in nearby Bosnia and Herzegovina. She continued her studies, met with friends, went ice skating, and watched movies like any other teen.
A truce between the warring sides, known as the Vance Plan, was signed in January 1992, and Diana eagerly returned home despite her parents’ reservations. Arriving with hopes for normalcy, she came to learn that there were no friends to talk to, and the friends with whom she was eventually reunited were not the same.
In March 1992, during her birthday, Diana experienced another series of mortar strikes.
“I remember foolishly thinking that it’s my birthday, so they will probably not shoot at us,” she said. “When the mortar hits, you can feel your kidneys shaking inside.”
Diana returned to her host family briefly. JNA mortar strikes continued intermittently in Osijek, until eventually ceasing in June 1992, making it safe for Diana to return to her family for good.
Coming home, she saw both a changed physical landscape of destroyed factories and churches and a changed community that had lost many of its members.
The Croatian military had relied on volunteers who would undergo brief training before receiving weapons and sent to fight. Due to the high number of casualties, the Croatian military began drafting individuals who were 18 years or older.
Many of the young neighbors were drafted,” she recalls. “A lot of my parents’ friends were either killed or suffered severe PTSD.”
A Student Once More
At the age of 18, following the war’s conclusion in 1995, Diana was introduced by her mother’s friend to an Osijek-based non-profit organization named PRONI . Led by professors and tutors from Northern Ireland and Sweden, PRONI was an initiative started by the Swedish University of Jönköping with the goal of supporting post-war reconciliation and training youth to be leaders. It also emphasized a multiplier effect in which students would be provided with the tools and knowledge to engage with other young people in their communities while promoting further prejudice reduction, as tensions were high following the war.
Although she didn’t have many expectations for the program other than the opportunity to practice her English, Diana was met with instructors who would ask for the opinions of their students rather than repeating information from a textbook, a refreshing experience that taught her to express herself.
“The Croatian education system is not helpful in letting you think for yourself and express yourself,” she said. “It rewards you for reading the textbook and repeating. Until I got to PRONI, I also thought this way. It made me realize how easy it was to manipulate people.”
Diana and her cohort of Croatians and Serbians participated in a two-year university course to learn the skills necessary to eventually lead youth groups and various projects in their respective communities. They were provided with learning opportunities and traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands, and Northern Ireland, meeting with many youth workers along the way and exchanging valuable experiences.
One unique aspect of the program was that, following completion of the course, participants earned EU-recognized certificates from the University of Jönköping. For a majority of the students, getting a degree for communication and hands-on education was a better option as opposed to pursuing higher education in a traditional manner.
“One student was a shoemaker,” Diana said. “She had always wanted to be a therapist. But it was difficult to get into college after finishing trade school. Through the program, she was able to get a post-secondary education and later opened her own studio.”
Working with Youth
After completing the two-year course, Diana accepted a position working for PRONI. While leading a youth club and serving as a tutor for more than seven years, she enjoyed seeing young people of different backgrounds gradually break down their mental barriers through meaningful interactions and experience positive change.
Her work contradicted Croatia’s education policy at the time, which did not prioritize creative experiences within schools. Segregation was also common, as Croatian and Serbian students were instructed at different times of the day in Latin and Cyrillic, respectively, prompting further divides.
Diana and her colleagues from PRONI engaged with students at an Osijek school for two hours weekly, leading activities designed to promote prejudice reduction between Croatian and Serbian students.
One activity envisioned a train car with passengers. Students would choose a person to sit with and explain their reasoning. Additional information would then be given to the students with the goal of examining and questioning prejudices and strengthening acceptance of differences. Another game consisted of each student holding an orange, and at a sign, they would pass it to the person sitting next to them. While rhythm was key, the students “learned that we are all functioning as a community.”
However, buy-in from the local community was challenging as was the opposition from the school. The principal needed persuasion from Diana and her colleagues to understand that these activities, which were not examples of “traditional” education, held value.
Although the students enjoyed these activities, Diana recalls a group of boys displaying hesitance in continuing their friendships with students from the other ethnic group.
“What would our parents say if they had heard about us interacting with the other kids?” they said. It was a tough response to hear after the time spent with these students.
“I was heartbroken because despite all they had done, they still looked up so much to their parents,” she said. “But it gave me…hope that you may not see immediate results but something can open in the future.”
War and Healing
Working at PRONI was critical in helping Diana consider events from different perspectives, especially during a period following tremendous loss of life.
“It taught me a lot about empathy,” she said. “And it wasn’t just the theoretical knowledge gained but also learning how to dig deeper into your brain and seeing that thoughts and feelings don’t always need to be kept to yourself.”
Diana would stay with PRONI until leaving in 2011 to pursue a PhD in Social Work in the United States, where she currently lives. She keeps in touch with some of the students she tutored as well as her former colleagues, many of whom still work at PRONI. But she refrained from speaking or thinking about her life during the Croatian War until nearly 15 years later.
“I was listening to an Iranian woman speak about her experiences with oppression,” she said. “That one-hour presentation made some memories return, though not necessarily trauma. I gave myself permission to say that I went through horrible things, things that 12 year olds should not go through.”
At times, Diana can still experience triggers that lead to thoughts of the conflict. The fireworks during July 4 remind her of gunshots. Guns, for her, are also hard to comprehend as they serve a dual role of protecting and perpetuating violence: something that she learned from the war.
Looking back at the war and searching for meaning, Diana sees things that weren’t so apparent when she lived through the conflict.
“There are more things that bring us together as humans than make us go apart,” she said. “Look at everybody as another human being rather than the things that make you different.”
To this day, Diana cherishes the close friendships she formed and visits the office whenever she is in Croatia.
And whenever she returns to her parents’ house in Osijek, she sees the wall near the staircase. Although her father repaired the damage as best he could, shrapnel is still embedded in the bricks, a reminder of the long-ago war that still feels recent.