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This site is about a project I single-handedly started and funded in the year 2000. It will show you a country in desperate need of exposure.
War has brought
devastating destruction upon the Balkans. Not only will this site show you
it's ruins, but it will also bring to light how terrifyingly similar the
Balkans are to other countries on our planet...perhaps even your own
homeland.
Not only ruins,
but also the justified burden of guilt which should be supported by the rest
of the world, for it was through the 'Treaty of Verdun' that the borders of
Yugoslavia were decided in 1918. Thanks to the victorious allies who threw
themselves all too greedily upon the German colonies in Africa while ignoring
the European continent Yugoslavia's borders became a time-bomb which kept on
ticking until it's massive explosion in the 90's. It was the last, cruel
battle of the First World War.
Today the Balkans are in a state of coexistence, not peace. Peace will only be established when the mourning generations have died out. Again I've found a similarity in history... An old woman's memories of the destruction of towns like Ieper in West-Flanders, Belgium... there wasn't a German on the planet who could do anything right according to my own grandmother and her mother before her. It was only ten years ago, that she still burst into tears telling me the story of a young student in Bruges who was brutally shot for staying up late studying. My great grandmother on the other side had hair as black as the night turned white as snow in just a couple of days because of the sound of the artillery shells. It took three generations for this anti-German feeling to vanish and it's still not vanished... but there is peace. |
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I thought that it may be justified to say that we are at least culturally linked to the Balkan nations. To focus on this cultural and historic link I decided to take on a project in regions of the tri-state area in the north-west of Croatia, north-east of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the east of the Yugoslavian Republic. I took trees from the old confrontation zone "Ieper's Salient" in Flanders Fields to plant them in the closest possible communities in the tri-state area. A commemorative plaque is to accompany them later. I had no financial government support of any kind and recklessly had to entrust my safety into Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian hands. This far, I've always been treated quite amicably by all of them. I particularly want Project Proximity to be a helping hand from the people to the people, I might not be able to rebuild all their houses or give them back their life before this terrible war, but I can try to give them back a piece of their heart and personality. Project Proximity can never make amends for all the broken hearts and loved ones lost and forever remembered, but I want to make sure it is never forgotten. Forgetting them is forgetting ourselves, for it is a shared suffering; Europe always was "united in adversity". I, and the people of the Balkans, thank you for visiting this site. Respectfully yours, Alex
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