I HAVE TOLD MY OLD WOMAN ...

In Ilidza, Near Sarajevo: Bombs, Murders, Robberies

AIM Sarajevo, 31 October, 1996

Stana Luledzija, a seventy-year old self-supporting woman from Ilidza, lay killed in her house until the fact that she had not showed up for two days caused suspicion among her neighbours. That same day, a bomb exploded in front of the house in which association called the Democratic Initiative of Sarajevo Serbs (DISS) has its seat. Not even an hour passed before another bomb exploded in front of the house of Kristofer Jokic, a lawyer who is a member of the Association. The following evening, power went off for a short while in Ilidza. In that period, a robbery occurred of a house which belonged to family Berak who are activists of the DISS, which is, unfortunately, nothing unusual in the circumstances prevailing here. However, it sounds as a record out of Ripley's book that within this darkness which lasted hardly half an hour, robbers of Berak house, who should have also been caught unprepared (have they!?) by the blackout, managed to pull out 36 plugs, take away all the radiators, pipeline and the whole central heating installation, and other "trifles" which could not have been taken away without a truck and an organized operation. The very next day, unknown people moved into the ravaged house. The following morning, the house of Bozica Stanisic (step-mother of Miodrag Stanisic, President of the DISS) was burnt, while she was beaten up while trying to resist to unknown attackers...

All this was happening last week, in popularly called reintegrated parts of Sarajevo which in the end of March were transferred from Republica Srpska into the competence of B&H Federation. In Sarajevo media, which have lately been full of comments on impossibility of return of refugees (Chairman of the Presidency of B&H, Alija Izetbegovic, in a conversation with the commander of FOR, Lopez, criticized the phenomenon of burning down houses whose owners wished to return and preventing implementation of Annex 7 of the Peace Agreement), none of the listed cases from reintegrated regions were even mentioned. After the journalistic and international stampede which swept over Sarajevo suburbs during the transfer of power in Ilidza, Blazuj, Hadzici or Grbavica, these parts of the city are not discussed at all. Why?

"We are afraid that after six months since reintegration and almost a year after Peace accords were signed, the process of return of people not only has not even started yet, but ethnic engineering, let us call it that, continues", claims Maksim Stanisic, President of the Democratic Initiative of Sarajevo Serbs. "Numerous promises we were given immediately after transfer of power, about the right to education and health services, Sarajevo as a multiethnic city, came to nothing, and the worst thing is the current situation in which there is no safety", Stanisic concludes.

After reintegration of Sarajevo suburbs, according to the assessments of DISS, between 8.5 and 10 thousand Serbs have remained in the region, and the number of those interested in return imcreases every day. Into about 10 thousand empty houses of the domicile population, in fact, of the Serbs who had decided to wait for the entrance of the authorities of the Federation on the territory of the Serb entity, mostly refugees from Podrinje were colonized. Banished persons, the worst cases of refugees from eastern Bosnia, who had been in one of the camps in the vicinity of Tuzla, Zivinice or war-devastated Vozuca when the Dayton accords were signed, became the new inhabitants of Sarajevo. Along with banished and homeless persons - like after all wars - groups of semi-mobsters also came to Ilidza, Vogosca, Blazuj or Hadzici, and manipulating with, for example, Bosniac Golgotha of Srebrenica, raided and plundered, taking away with them everything but the bare walls of houses. Words like "Srebrenica" or "jihad warrior's families", instead of the true meaning they had during the war, became synonyms for plunder and criminal acts.

"They are not real refugees", says Desanka B. from Blazuj, pointing at the house across the road. "Who knows how many have lived in turns over there, and every one of them took something they liked with them. And over there, in that house, a real refugee from Srebrenica lives. His father was killed in his presence. He is our best neighbour now. He does not even cross the threshold of our house before he calls and tells us he would come. Seeing his grief, I become speechless. I know what was happening in Srebrenica. But, those who pass by here, plunder and burn, they are the ones to be feared of. They are the ones who would like to get rid of us, not the people who have suffered Golgotha", says this perturbed woman whose house, as she says, was plundered five times since the reintegration.

Almost all the natives stress that the federal police regularly answers all the calls and records, together with the IPTF, everything that is happening in reintegrated regions. But, the issue at stake here is to what extent they can really control safety in reintegrated territories when not a single B&H official has ever paid the slightest attention to developments over here. Despite the repeated proclaimed acceptance of the Dayton accords, especially of Annex 7 on return of refugees, the Government in Sarajevo has not condemned with a single word of rebuke crimes on reintegrated territories, and for Bosnian Minister of the interior, Avdo Hebib, this part of Sarajevo has ceased to be interesting the moment he put up new, shining, green signs of the Federation. Is marginalization of reintegrated territories actually a sign of approval of crime aimed at further intimidation of the remaining citizens of Serb nationality and their departure from Sarajevo is a question unwillingly discussed by everybody:

"I do not believe that criminals who are raiding this part of Sarajevo feel such an increased dose of national intolerance towards the Serbs and that this is the sole reason they have picked them as the target group. No, in the heads of such profiteers, it is not nationalism that determines their actions, but exclusively profit they will make by stealing and plundering. But, the fact that the ruling structures of the Federation have not reacted and do not condemn such action, gives them the right to continue to do what they have been doing. In fact, I think that such people know only too well that they do not ill-treat the native Serbs only because they are Serbs, but because they know that hardly anybody will try to protect these people and that it is easiest to rob and banish them and take their houses", claims Goran Kapor, one of the fifteen councillors of Serb nationality in the Council of Ilidza municipality.

Dusan Sehovac, also a councillor and Vice-President of the DISS, believes that this stance of B&H officials might imply silent agreement and a kind of extra-institutional pressure to force the Sarajevo Serbs to leave this territory:

"Unfortunately, this was not the first murder which happened after transfer of power. Several months ago, a thirty-seven year old woman was killed, and perpetrators of this crime have not been revealed yet. This, and the latest developments, unfortunately, introduce additional fear and force people to leave their homes and sell them for mere trifles. It is no secret that not far from here, there is a real estate agency called Praxis where after such cases, the number of those who wish to leave Sarajevo suddenly increases.

Following this and the information that in the past two months only in Luzani about fifteen houses were sold, in the very centre of this part of Ilidza I come across the "Praxis" agency whose sign says that it is a specialized institution for "offering intellectual services". I enter the agency and ask about the possibility of buying a house in Ilidza. I get the answer that, of course, it is possible to buy a house, and a few counter-questions about what type of house I am interested in (with business premises or without them, with a garage or without it, with only the ground floor, or with a few floors, in what part of Ilidza and similar) and then finally the question: how much money I am ready to set aside for such a house. After the mentioned sum of about 30 thousand German marks, which is allegedly the price of houses around here according to the ads, the owner of the agency (later I learn that he himself is a Serb) raises his voice: "Oh, no, nobody will buy Serb houses dirt-cheap any more. There is nothing below 150 thousand marks. And you don't look like somebody who wishes to settle down here. You must be a journalist. I won't talk to you!" After that, the statement follows that all the data I wish to know are "business secret", and I am shown out of the agency.

Sixty-year old Rajko M. is the next-door neighbour of the killed Stana Luledziija. Interrupting his story that the old woman was found after two days on the floor in a pool of blood, I ask him if he is scared and if he is thinking of leaving Sarajevo:

"You know, son, the first day I told my old woman to start packing immediately. I felt so terribly pressured, I said maybe the next day they would come to our house. And then I see how many policemen stirred up around here, both ours and those foreigners, and then I started thinking, oh well, maybe they will stop now. Maybe they have gone too far with this murder and will quiet down now. Since the police is making such an effort to investigate, maybe they will finally get scared", explains Rajko his logic for having stayed in his home.

"This is a matter of creating or not creating a political ambience and conditions where all civil rights will be exercised correctly", these are the words of Beriz Belkic, one of the deputies of the President of Ilidza municipality. "On the one hand we have made progress together with representatives of the High Commissioner's Office. We have formed joint municipal agencies, together with native citizens, and as we say, colonized persons mostly from Podrinje. Unfortunately, despite these official results, things which cause concern are still happening. These criminal acts demand a serious political approach, or a political analysis of everything that is happening, as well as of everything in the background. Is it the result of a lack of an explanation that revanchism, if this is a case of revanchism at all, cannot resolve anything and that there are legal agencies and laws which can resolve things, or is it the result of a feeling that crime will not be punished. In the first days of reintegration existence of a misunderstanding was almost logical, as well as incidents or verbal insults, but nowadays, seven months later, everything is acquiring the forms of classical crime", says Belkic.

Walking around Ilidza, I come across a clinic established during the war while this Sarajevo suburb was controlled by Republica Srpska. Nowadays, there are no physicians of Serb nationality who have remained in Ilidza working in the clinic, although after reintegration, all medical, teaching and other personnel were guaranteed to remain at their jobs. In the crowded waiting room, I run across a medical technician, Jasmin Kunovac:

"I don't really know what happened. I have known these physicians before the war, we worked together in the Ilidza Medical Centre. Believe me, there is no problem among us. We receive all patients regardless of nationality, because our profession orders us to do so. Physicians of Serb nationality come in the afternoons to the clinic and help the citizens as a form of humanitarian aid. And the fact that they have no right to have a stamp, to write prescriptions and to send patients to hospitals if necessary, is the result of the fact that they were not given the jobs after reintegration. Why this is so, people in the public institution which controls Medical Centres in Sarajevo should know, because they are our superiors.

Unfortunately, it was impossible to find any responsible person in the administration of the Medical Centres, and the kind secretary explained to me, after she had heard what I wanted to talk about with the director, that "both the director and his deputy were on a business trip".

Are the President and the Vice-President of the Federation, members of the Presidency, Minister of police, Federal Prime Minister, Governor of the Sarajevo Canton and other B&H officials also on a business trip, I did not investigate. They are probably concerned about personnel combinations, choice of places where they will meet each others, physical showdowns inside state security service, and similar current "high political" problems. Right under their noses, crimes, robberies, murders and forcing people to leave their homes going on. Who will and in what way return people from Srebrenica, Zepa or Rogatica to their homes? Or perhaps, nobody is expecting Annex 7 of the Dayton accords to be implemented any more.

DRAZENA PERANIC