U.S. tour offers visitors lessons on tolerance

If you think ethnic conflict is bad in Los Angeles, listen to the stories of recent visitors Aleksandar Milovanovic, Edin Colic and Gjylnaze Syla.

Milovanovic, a Serbian Christian, said Albanian Muslims expelled him from his land, decapitated his uncle and burned his family homes. Syla, a member of the Kosovo parliament in Serbia, said mobs burned her family homes and expelled her sister. Colic of Bosnia-Herzegovina said he went without sufficient food, healthcare, schooling and electricity for three years while Serbian military forces surrounded his native Sarajevo.

Having survived the terrors of ethnic cleansing, war and raging hatred as the former Yugoslavia broke up in the 1990s, the three Eastern Europeans came to Los Angeles recently to learn how this city manages its dizzying ethnic diversity and promotes pluralism and tolerance.

Among the lessons learned: Dialogue makes a difference. Networking among ethnic community groups to promote common interests is vital. And ducking the problems makes them worse.”What I found out is that you have your problems here, but the U.S. addresses them,” Syla said. “You see it. You face it. That’s what makes America great. Europe is much slower to react.”

The 10-day visit to a total of seven cities, co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, included meetings with city officials, Hollywood players, religious leaders and community activists from Latino, Asian American, black, gay and Jewish groups.

The committee’s Rabbi Andy Baker said he began organizing the “Promoting Tolerance in Central and Eastern Europe” program in 1992 in collaboration with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation of Germany to help the region’s developing democracies learn from U.S. experiences with diversity.

Jewish communities, which had suffered repression under the region’s Communist rule, were beginning to see what Baker called populist anti-Semitism after the end of the Cold War. New press freedoms, for instance, opened the door to the republication of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and other biased publications, Baker said.

“Freedom didn’t suddenly bring understanding and appreciation of ethnic relations, as we saw in the former Yugoslavia,” Baker said. “The challenge for us was what could we take from our experiences in America to benefit what was going on in these societies.”

The program’s 18 participants visited Capitol Hill and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; toured Little Italy and the Jewish Lower East Side in New York City; and explored Olvera Street and Chinatown in Los Angeles. They also visited the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and experienced Shabbat at the homes of local families.

Several participants, most of them young political leaders, said their meetings with ethnic and charitable organizations left some of the deepest impressions. In Washington, for instance, the group discussed race and ethnic issues with representatives from the Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute, Japanese American Citizens League and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

At the Skirball Center, a panel about Hollywood’s effect on pluralism was a “big hit,” according to Steve Addison, the American Jewish Committee’s director of international relations in Los Angeles.

Vic Bulluck, executive director of the NAACP’s Hollywood office, said he outlined how his organization serves as a watchdog over media portrayals of African Americans and works with other ethnic groups to push minority hiring.

And at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center, Chief Executive Lorri L. Jean described the organization’s successful legal fight more than three decades ago to win nonprofit status, which the federal government had denied, and its collaborative work with other groups to protest bias against immigrants, ethnic minorities and others.

To Julia Leferman, a National Liberal Party of Romania member, the dynamic role of U.S. nonprofit and community organizations in promoting tolerance was particularly instructive. In Romania, where the government officially recognizes 18 minority groups, people depend on the state to solve their problems, she said. She wondered aloud if the nation’s Gypsies, formally known as Romas, might become more integrated into society with stronger networking among private minority organizations.

“In Romania, people depend on the state to solve their problems, including minorities,” she said. “Here, communities are working together to better promote their interests without necessarily relying on the federal and state governments.”

Milovanovic, a legal assistant at the Democratic Party of Serbia’s Education Center, said he was impressed by discussions about common values and beliefs between Muslim and Jewish youth in Chicago.

“This is something we could do between Serbians and Albanians,” he said. “We have so many common issues: unemployment, the pain we share on both sides. “It would require a lot of energy and strength to do this,” he added, “but if we don’t deal with it we’ll be in constant danger of another cycle of violence.”

And Colic, a political science student and Liberal Democratic party board member of Bosnia-Herzegovina, said he gained hope for the future between Bosnians and Serbs after seeing how the Jewish committee and German foundation had paired up to produce the tolerance program. He also was inspired by the educational power of the Holocaust Memorial, he said.

“We definitely need something like that so we can teach the next generation of kids what people can do to people -- so they can learn from the mistakes of their parents,” he said. “I don’t think it will happen soon, though, because everything is still fresh.”

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com