International Workers Aid was formally founded at a meeting held in Manchester at the end of October, 1993. Campaigns from Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Slovenia, Italy, France, Spain, Ireland as well as from Britain were in attendance. These national campaigns, already in existence for more than 6 months had an impressive history of achievements; building an organisation of solidarity throughout Europe, establishing links and winning the active support of Trade Unions in ex-Yugoslavia, succeeding in getting its first convoy to Tuzla and developing a bond with the workers of that region. The Manchester meeting established IWA on a genuine democratic foundation. International Workers Aid began life as Red Aid for Bosnia in the spring of 1993 in Britain. On the weekend of June 5/6th it held a poorly attended demonstration and a not much better attended conference which agreed to; • a) change its name to Workers Aid for Bosnia • b) adopt a 10 point programme of action & • c) send an aid convoy to Tuzla The choice of Tuzla as a destination was not an accidental one. Tuzla remains a multi-ethnic town which embodies the spirit of both the old Jugoslavia and the Bosnian tradition. Tuzla is also a workers town. An industrial region with active trade unions with their own history of Mick Woods international solidarity. Miners in Tuzla supported the British Miners during the great strike in 1984/5. Driving to Tuzla was going to be a political statement about the unity of European workers. The camalso calls for an end to ethnic paign cleansing, for the right of Bosnia to exist and the lifting of the arms embargo, The organisations initiating W.A.B. were The Campaign Against Fascism in Europe, Workers Revolutionary Party/Workers Press, Socialist Outlook, and the Bosnia Herzegovina Fund of Britain. The rapid growth of support and sponsorship following the conference reflected the energy of the campaign and the spontaneous public support for such an initiative. Soon the names of national trade unions, MPs, Councillors, trade union workplaces, immigrant & refugee organisations and women's organisations were swelling the list. Collections of money and aid began in workplaces, mosques, local communities and on the streets. The campaign succeeded because it combined the politics of the 10 point programme, with the practical cutting edge of the aid convoy. Workers who had sat and watched the horrors of the war of aggression in Bosnia now felt they could get involved and do something.
The convoy left Dundee on August 9th. It had two trucks and its first donation of aid from the Timex strikers who understood the need for international solidarity in the face of an employer trying to shift their jobs to a low wage economy. They also gave us a box of tee shirts which were delivered to the Trade Unions in Tuzla.
As the convoy wound through Scotland, England and Wales caution and conservatism were thrown to the wind as donations of food, clothing, medicines and cash turned a convoy of two trucks into the convoy of ten trucks which left Dover on September 6th. On the way we visited, spoke at, were received in, collected on the streets of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, Kirkby, Leigh, Manchester, Salford, Oldham, Bradford, Huddersfield, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, Birmingham, Swansea, Cardiff, London, Crawley and Brighton. We visited pit camps run by women from mining communities, slept in community centres, spoke at rallies, attended trade union meetings, were fed by immigrant organisations and made friends wherever we went. We were assisted by volunteers who staffed our office in London, motor mechanics in several towns who repaired our trucks and 100,000 colourful leaflets which passed on the message of the campaign.
While we were burning up the roads of Britain, international support was being organised in Europe, trucks were filled in Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Italy and Hungary. When the convoy hit the continent we had a full schedule of activities to attend from Lille in North Eastern France to Brno in Moravia and from Hamburg to Geneva. Major breakthroughs occurred in the 2 weeks of the European leg of the convoy. Contact was made with unions from France and Germany to Slovenia. We won the support of the CFDT and CGT trade union federations in France, our German leg collected over 8000DM and met up with two Swedish trucks in Berlin.
Having said all this the organisation was far from clockwork... few of the participants had previously either driven a truck, used a tachograph, driven a truck through customs, driven a truck on the right-hand side of the road, some had British visitors passports which were worthless in Slovenia, and few could speak any lanMick Woods guage apart from English. In many ways it is a miracle that any of the trucks reached former-Jugoslavia given most of them were previously breadvans, post office trucks, and removal vans; most were old and all were obviously overloaded. We also faced, in parts, a schedule designed to be done in a BMW, not a truck with a maximum speed of 75kph.
Worse of all was that on our arrival in Jesenice it became clear that we had little idea of how to get to Tuzla. In an ideal world one could just drive to Zagreb, straight down the Belgrade road, right over the bridge at Zupanja and you would be 2 hours leisurely drive from Tuzla. The world being less than ideal means that the Belgrade highway has been cut by the Serbs at what is now called UN Protection Area West, the Bridge at Zupanja was blown-up by the HVO and you have to cross two frontlines and the major Serb supply corridor at Broko.
So we investigated other routes...these didn't seem too jolly either. We also applied to the UN for assistance and got the bureaucratic run-around. We bombarded them with faxes from the European Labour movement to no avail. Eventually we got so fed up with the UN we blockaded the UNPROFOR HQ in Zagreb for 14 hours joining a demonstration of relatives of dead and missing Croats from the Vukovar area. In the course of this blockade we got a lot of support from ordinary Croatian people, a lot of media coverage and had a very interesting confrontation with the UNPROFOR which included having sand put in the engine of one of our trucks and being threatened with armoured cars. As interesting as all this was it got us no nearer to getting a route to Tuzla.
It was at this point that a Mrs Sek, a junior minister in the Croatian foreign ministry, suggested we take the route previously mentioned. More in hope than expectation we set out on this route only to quickly be interned at a charmless little town called Belovar by some fairly
charmless police who were less than convinced of the wisdom of Mrs Sek (a feeling some of us were to share in the weeks to come). After two days at Bjelovar we continued on to Zupanja where we were stopped by a much more charming police - chief who also thought Mrs Sek had a good sense of humour and who wouldn't let us cross to Orasje (a small HVO-held enclave in Northern Bosnia) where we had been promised co-operation. Having been stopped we spent a week in Zupanja: a week where we tried, unsuccessfully, to pressurise the Croatian government into letting us across. This culminated in a two-day sit-down on the border road by the ferry which links Zupanja to Orajse. This was however getting us nowhere, a fact confirmed by a few of us who got across to Orajse to meet the town council, who made it pretty clear they were still friendly but orders from Mostar and the fact that the war was warming-up in those parts meant there was no way we could get through.
The Hungarian truck unloaded its goods in a village full of refugees called Gornai and the rest of us started to discuss the next move. Two positions were put: the WRP and others argued that we should unload or store our goods and return to our home countries to organise a larger convoy; Fourth International supporters, a SAC (Swedish independent union) member and some independents argued that given the non-feasibility of the Northern Route we should investigate running from Split. The first position was adopted by the majority of the convoy: this seemed to me irrational given the experience of the previous few weeks and was the first sign that the WRP had adopted a form of tunnel vision around the Northern Route to the exclusion of all else. The political differences were probably to some extent confused by the desire/need of some comrades to leave and return to their homes and jobs but this is not to underplay or Mick Woods devalue the genuine differences that had emerged.
A minority felt that we still had a mandate to get through to Tuzla and set off to acquire UN Blue Cards, which was difficult, and moved down to Split to prepare our trucks for the trip over the mountains. [Unfortunately, while our convoy was nearing Tuzla, the WRP who had returned to Britain to attend the Manchester meeting, refused to establish a genuinely democratic basis for the future British campaign, or to accept the majority decisions of the International meeting held the next day. They walked out of IWA when they lost a vote, in order to construct a separate campaign dominated by their small band of supporters.] We crossed the Herceg-Bosna border on November 4th without proper paperwork. We unloaded a trailer in Herceg-Bosna (it would not have been able to be driven over the mountains) and proceeded to Tomislavgrad. We managed to get to Vitez the following day by jumping between military convoys and weren't stopped. Getting out of Vitez was a little more difficult and we spent 3 hours being searched and threatened. Two of us tried to lighten the atmosphere by cracking open a bottle of brandy with the HVO, they brought some food and we chatted in fractured German as best we could. Having passed Vitez we were in free Bosnia: at the first BiH checkpoint we were given another drink and passed cigarettes around We then drove onto Visoko where we spent the night at a Canadian UN base before driving up to Vares and Tuzla the next day. Workers Aid had arrived In Tuzla we were treated as celebrities. The population of Tuzla had been following the progress of the convoy for some months and, rumours being what they are, had expected a mite more than 3 trucks. We unloaded our aid into the hands of the miners union who organised its distribution to workers' canteens and as food parcels. We met the mayor Selim Beslegic, the unions, the army and many ordinary
people. We were guests on the local TV and radio stations and gave the message loud and clear that the workers of Europe had not forgotten the people of Tuzla. We saw the fantastic efforts and resilience of the Tuzla people and also the poverty, dislocation, starvation and economic disaster caused by the war. We were able to record these experiences on video and get interviews that would help our future campaign.
Unfortunately the snows fell early in Bosnia and we were obliged to abandon our trucks near Vares on the return trip because we had no snowchains. We hope to be able to recover them this spring and return them to Split. A subsequent convoy from Sweden was also forced to unload its aid in Zagreb due to adverse weather conditions and unsuitable vehicles for the route.
We learnt much about the mechanics of getting aid through and feel we can now do a professional job of assisting Tuzla. This was thoroughly discussed at an IWA meeting at Copenhagen, on December 11/12th, the first after the Manchester meeting, and the following points were agreed • 1) That we should allocate 60,000DM to buying and supporting 3 four-wheel-drive trucks, a warehouse in Split plus volunteers to run aid into Tuzla from Spring onwards.
• 2) To organise a convoy to Split in late march/early April.
• 3) To concentrate our aid on food: especially on collecting and delivering flour, sugar and oil, these being the staple foods in Bosnia.
• 4) To organise a European tour of unions from ex-Jugoslavia; Nezavisimost an anti-war, anti-Milosevic union from Serbia, The SSSH (United Autonomous Trade Union of Croatia) which gave us so much Mick Woods assistance in Zagreb, Zupanja and Split, and the Slovenian Metalworkers Union.
These projects give us achievable goals for the first part of 1994. The IWA campaign across Europe has already received impressive sponsorships and financial support. A new 'rolling convoy' began in early January, 1994, with lorries from Sweden and Denmark. In Britain the campaign has established groups in many cities, some of which are funding their own lorries, it has organised days of action calling on the UN to allow the opening of Tuzla airport and distributed large quantities of publicity material.
Obviously any plans we have are contingent on the development of the war and diplomacy in the region. However, the campaign will be on full speed ahead throughout the winter months. We will be developing our political campaigning around the reopening of Tuzla airport and against the arms embargo and against any military intervention by the Western pow-