THE NORWEGIAN-YUGOSLAVIAN ASSOCIATION
AND
THE YUGOSLAVIAN-NORWEGIAN ASSOCIATION
During the second World War, several forced labour camps for Yugoslavian prisoners were established in Norway, most of them in Northern Norway (mainly in Nordland County), and in Trøndelag. The local population and the prisoners in these so-called “Serbian camps” made lasting bonds of friendship, which led to formal social agreements after the end of the war.
After the liberation of Norway in 1945, the surviving prisoners from Northern Norway and Trøndelag were given temporary shelter in the village of Melhus outside of Trondheim. The men became a popular fixture of the town in the days following the war, further developing the bonds between the local communities and the Yugoslavs.
To formalise and commemorate these relationships, twin organisations – the Norwegian-Yugoslavian Association and the Yugoslavian-Norwegian Association – were officially founded on 26. July 1945, at the Britannia Hotel in Trondheim.
Initially, these organisations didn’t last long. In the late summer and autumn of 1945, the liberated Yugoslav prisoners were returned to their home country. Internal issues within Yugoslavia, the distances between the two countries, as well as the volatile political situation internationally, made it too difficult to maintain and develop the formal relationships of the twin Associations.
However, the individual friendships formed between Yugoslavs and Norwegians during the war were strong enough to survive the turbulent post-war period. Social communication between communities started growing from the early 1950s. Soon, plans were being made for another attempt at formal cooperation.
Finally, after two decades, The Norwegian-Yugoslavian Association Trøndelag was founded in Trondheim, on 26. October 1966.
It soon became clear that there was considerable interest in the organisation not only in Trøndelag, but in the rest of Norway as well. At its annual conference in Trondheim on 26. February 1969, the Association voted to remove “Trøndelag” from the name. The organisation went nation-wide, with branches both in Northern and Eastern Norway. A few weeks earlier, during a meeting in Nis with 800 participants, the Yugoslavian-Norwegian Association had been officially re-formed.
The Yugoslavian civil war in the 1990s made it highly difficult to maintain organised social cooperation of this kind, and a national conference on 10. October 1992 made the decision to disband the organisation.
22. January 1994 saw the establishment of the «Friendship Society Serbia – Montenegro», and six years later, in 2000, the re-forming of the Norwegian-Yugoslavian Association. In 2011, this organisation changed its name to The Norway-West Balkan Friendship Association.
The organisation has now reached a fork in the road. Its biggest challenge: to choose a path that makes it possible to transfer the strong ties of friendship and cooperation to the next generations.
It’s a great challenge, one that the young people of our communities have to figure out how to solve.