Ten years ago, on her summer break from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Vesna Rebernak returned to her native Yugoslavia to visit her parents. The family lived in Ptuj, a small Slovenian town about 20 miles south of the Austrian border. “I was driving around thinking, ‘Oh, this is the most beautiful country,’” Rebernak recalls. “Suddenly there were all these tanks and they are blocking the bridges, blocking the roads. The whole army was out.” Slovenia had declared its independence from the republic, and Belgrade had responded by sending in troops.
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With the support of its western European neighbors, Slovenia was able to break free of the republic without the bloodshed that would follow in Croatia, and by fall Rebernak was back in Chicago, earning her graduate degree in architecture. Troubled by the growing conflict in the Balkans and the propaganda being disseminated by its various factions, she and a group of Yugoslav Chicagoans formed Dialogue for Peace, which sponsored panel discussions, organized clothing drives, and staged cultural events.
The incident must have been especially painful given Rebernak’s fond memories of cosmopolitan Yugoslavia in the 70s. With ties to both the eastern bloc and the West, the country attracted tourists from Italy and Poland, from the United States and the Soviet Union. “For the West we were the East; for the East we were the West. And we could cross into both worlds easily. I grew up on films American and Russian, and Italian, and French. We were really exposed to the whole world culture.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Dorothy Perry.
