Featured Member: Dragan Markovic

The war in Yugoslavia was in full swing when Dragan Markovic graduated in psychology from the University of Belgrade. Large numbers of people had come from Bosnia and Croatia to seek refugee in his home country. Encouraged by a psychologist colleague to join in spontaneous visits to the refugee centres in Belgrade, he became a volunteer, counselling children, young people, and women in order to help address their psychological problems.

“My motivation to work in a humanitarian capacity grew together with the increasing size and scale of the crisis,” says Dragan. Luckily, his group of volunteers were able to find resources to enable their work. Their activities dovetailed with the programs of several international organizations, and the NGO they founded ended up becoming an implementing partner of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Save the Children Sweden, as well as being contracted by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The organization grew quickly. “Before I realized it, by 1994 to ’95 this initially voluntary group had become the largest psychosocial assistance NGO in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia,” says Dragan. Having simultaneously worked for several years as an assistant researcher in experimental psychology at Belgrade University, he was eventually able to focus entirely on his humanitarian work.

Currently, Dragan is an Emergency Specialist with UNICEF in Georgia, where his responsibilities are in three different areas. First, he coordinates UNICEF’s humanitarian program in conflict areas and with conflict-affected people. Second, he leads the emergency preparedness efforts of UNICEF and the UN Country Team. Third, he designs and implements a cross cutting Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) program, assisting the Georgian government with mainstreaming DRR into their policy frameworks. Apart from these three core areas, he also contributes to needs assessments and analyses on the situation of children in Georgia.

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Children are always the most vulnerable to distress – fleeing from conflict and growing up with ‘transitional identities’ – while having fewer coping mechanisms than adults.

- Dragan Markovic

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He enjoys working for the UN since it gives him the possibility to directly affect the government institutions that are supposed to provide services to the population. Reminding them of their responsibility is important, he says, so that they “develop policies that will have an impact on protecting or promoting the rights of the affected individuals as well as fund the implementation of those policies.” Nevertheless, as he points out, in a situation of conflict it is a challenge just to be able to provide the minimum necessary.

In such challenging environments, humanitarian work can often be very demanding at a personal level for the professionals involved, Dragan points out. To help deal with these issues, he thinks PHAP could play an important role in helping “identify the challenging factors that make humanitarian work difficult and that put humanitarian workers at risk and then consult with the humanitarian community to find strategies to address such factors.”

What Dragan says he strives for is to be able to assist those in distress to protect their dignity and individuality. The challenge, as he sees it, is “to mobilize resources that to a greater or lesser degree contribute to meeting the needs that people communicate.” He highlights in particular his experience of working with children: “Providing resources that make children’s situations closer to normal, and helping them put their trauma into perspective, was an important experience to me.” Giving extra care to children is important, according to Dragan, since “children are always the most vulnerable to distress – fleeing from conflict and growing up with ‘transitional identities’ – while having fewer coping mechanisms than adults.”

Dragan mentions that it can be a challenge to keep a personal and professional distance from the needs you are confronted with. In order to ensure the participation of those in need, he sees it as important to not perceive them as beneficiaries, but rather as partners in improving the situation. “It is easy to get lost in interpreting the needs of people and end up deciding what is the best for them, without even wanting to do it this way,” he says.

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Interview conducted by Lena Zimmer      Text edited by Markus Forsberg