dear friends,

I just came back after New York exciting days with many activists from NEWW and many others.

The situaiton here is the following: first the so called financial police has "visited" four NGOs in Belgrade up to now: Group for Ethnic Relations, Women in Black, Anti War Center and Helsinki Human Rights Association, and two human rights groups outside, one in Nis, and one in Leskovac. They have not yet taken money from any of those, but have takn two computers from the Group for Ethnic Relations practicallly because noone wanted to talk to them and they decided to use force and take computers to read their files. In the Women in Black group they have been coming for four days, they took all the materials about Kosovo, and are still working with their accountant!

The NGOs from Serbia had a press conference last week and issued a very good statement (signed by more than 40 NGOs) in which they say that this is a form of repression to all the NGO sector, and that they will speak out of every act that happens to each one of us!

The second news is that all town is talking about the new law which the serbian regime announced as: "the law against terrorism". Different issues have been announced as possible to be in the laaw, first that this law will be in connection to the new NGO law, second that it will pronounce some NGO groups and independed medias as "terrorist", third that each media who will write about the so called "terrorist" groups will be punished, fourth that the law will probably give permission to police to be violent to practically everyone they consider to be 'terrorist". We still do not have the text of the law, so it is not clear if the announcement of the new law is a method of the manufacturing of fear or the possibility to become reality. Otherwise the women's groups are working as usual, there are three networks of women in politics and they are all permantntly active. The students on the Filosophy faculty are havning "noon o clock classes" , on which today Natasa Kandic talked about civil disobedience and state, and tomorrow two of us speak on "lesbian and gay movement and civil disobedience" with the title : "With high heels against the police sticks". I will talk about Brooklyn Pride parade and make sure to say that organized lesbians and gays are those segments of society which use politics to increase the production of joy, merriment, maskerade, body positive, sex in the city, dance on the street...... it is hot in Belgrade, lepa.

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