1991-1992: The war period

A group of women volunteers, future DESA founders, first got together in 1991, at the very beginning of hostilities in the former Yugoslavia. The women participated in an organized protest against the government, which was sending the army to shoot at their own people. That same year the ancient city of Dubrovnik, too, came under the attack of that army. It lived thirteen dark months under siege, before the Yugoslav army was finally forced to retreat from Dubrovnik at the end of 1992. Throughout 1992, during the long siege, the same group of volunteers sought ways to establish contacts with friends in the outside world and to solicit various kinds of help and assistance for the suffering population inside the bombarded and besieged city.

DESA officially started its activity with the project called Psychological Adjustment and Help for Women Refugees, Displaced Women and Local Women in Need. The volunteers established their operating base in March 1993 at the Hotel Libertas, once a sparkling conference hotel transformed into a semiderelict building full of refugees. Of the sixteen founder members of DESA, the five most active ones will constitute DESA's Executive Board.