DO RIGHT SOLUTIONS EXIST?

Refugees in B&H

AIM Sarajevo, 23 June, 1997

During her recent visit to Sarajevo, American Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, very clearly, briefly and with extreme precision, in a single sentence, explained the essential problem in Bosnia.

"Over here, everybody is living in somebody else's house, but in the end one house is lacking", said Madeleine Albraight.

To this day, the official number has never been publicised saying how many citizens have fled from Bosnia & Herzegovina, how many were moved (mostly forcibly) within it, but it is assumed that the figure amounts to about a million and hundred thousand refugees and slightly less than one million displaced persons.

Refugees in B&H are the result of SFRY tanks, armed soldiers and territorial aspirations of Belgarde (later also Zagreb) which in spring 1992 swooped down upon Bosnia. As respectable foreign analysts later established, refugees in B&H were the aim of a premeditated aggression. If this had not been true, there would not have been the ethnically cleansed territory along the winding course of the river Drina where B&H is bordering Serbia.

Tumbling, moving, banishing, evacuating of the population of Bosnia, mostly the Bosniacs, from one part of it to another, resulted in the fact that everybody is now living on somebody else's land and in somebody else's house. And only God knows how the stories of refugees' life will end.

Real confusion began when the Dayton accords were signed and the order "everybody should move back to their own home" was issued. Just when everybody occupied positions they would not leave for anything in the world, peace was signed in America which promised the banished Bosniac that he could return to Prijedor, Forca, Visegrad...

And while the banished people keep hoping that they would return to their homes, the others are still being banished from theirs. At the moment this text was written, all domestic and foreign media reported that 50 Bosniacs had been banished from the village of Kopice, twenty kilometres from Maglaj.

The Dayton accords have been violated again.

Host countries of Bosniac refugees circled the date of signing of the peace accords in Dayton in red, hoping that after that their guests from Bosnia would start returning home. However, even a year and a half after the end of war actions, it has not even started to happen, because it is first necessary to resolve the problems within the country.

Republica Srpska will not hear of the return of the Bosniacs and the Croats to Banja Luka, Zvornik, Bijeljina, Foca, Prijedor... High officials of the SDS authorities only declaratively support provisions of the Dayton accords which refer to return of refugees to their homes, but it is possible read about their "firm stand" concerning this issue in all their statements, decisions, actions, initiatives... Even ordinary people from Republika Srpska, asked in the fields, in schools, behind ploughs or factory machinery, say that "there is no need for the Muslims to return, everything is alright until they are over there, and we are over here".

On the territory of the Federation, nobody says this, at least not publicly. Citizens of Serb nationality complain that they are waiting for more than a year to have their appeals to return to their apartments resolved. The Croats compain about the same thing, but so do the Bosniacs into whose apartments in their absence, other Bosniacs banished from Visegrad, Srebrenica, Foca ... have moved in. Neither can the Sarajevo Jews, minority nation which the authorities in Bosnia & Herzegovina have often been inclined to, move back into their apartments.

Queues in courts and municipalities, windows where appeals, demands, requests, complaints are submitted, are crowded with people, their destinies, sighs and curses. The administrative machinery is extremely slow in resolving the submitted demands for a very simple reason - nothing has been agreed yet.

The opposition leader Sejfudin Tokic, vice-president of the Union of B&H Social Democrats, declared once that authorities of both entities had the same attitude towards the return, but manifested it differently. The authorities of Republica Srpska, according to his words, openly say that "there will be no return", and the authorities of the Federation say "that they are ready to allow return to all the Serbs, but only if return to the Bosniacs and the Croats to RS is allowed". And this makes the (vicious) circle complete.

The current joint authorities, Council of Ministers and Presidency of B&H, are preoccupied with the adoption of a package of laws for quick beginning of cooperation and returning of debts to the Wrld Bank, that is, with problems from the economic sphere. The politicians have agreed at this moment that the money from the Donors' conference must be taken. Everything else can wait.

Even if the authorities of the two entities, by any chance, managed to agree about the return of refugees and displaced persons to their homes, the process would be slow, because the people are afraid. During the first year of the war, but even later, on the territories controlled by the army of Republica Srpska, the Bosniacs and the Croats experienced mass murders, rape, maltreatment... There are places in which not a single adult male survived, because Serb soldiers shot them immediately after having entered the village (Srebrenica, villages around Vlasenica, Foca...), so that it is quite understandable that only women with young children would not dare to return. No less than fourteen thousand family requests demanding information about disappeared persons have been addressed to the authorities of Republica Srpska. Two thousand four hundred such requests have arrived at the address of the B&H Federation (one thousand and three hundred for the part controlled by the Army of B&H and one thousand and one hundred for the part controlled by the Croat Defence Council). The more than poor cooperation of Republica Srpska with the Tribunal in the Hague should also be added to this, as well as the fact that persons accused of war crimes have not been punished, because of whom a large number of banished citizens do not dare return.

The Serb Civic Council has recently taken initiative for amendment of the Constitution of the Federation and the Constitution of Republica Srpska demanding that the Serbs be considered a constituent nation in the Federation, and the Bosniacs and the Croats in Republica Srpska. The Constitution of the state prescribes that all three nations are constituent, but the constitutions of the entities, have decided that only majority nations should be constituent. That is how the impermissible thing happened that the Serbs are an ethnic minority in Sarajevo, and their relatives just a few kilometres away, in Lukavica, for example, are members of the constituent nation.

"The state cannot gain strength if some people are second rate citizens in it", Mirko Pejanovic, president of the Serb Civic Council declared a few days ago.

This detail about constituent nations is important because, even if he could, a Bosniac would not return to Zvornik and be a member of the minority and a second-rate citizen. The same refers to a Croat in Banja Luka or a Serb in Zenica.

The situation is far from being idyllic in the Federation either. For two years already accusations are heard, houses are set on fire, letters are being written, discreditting in the eyes of the international community is going on concerning this issue.

If we start from the beginning, we will remember that the leaders of Bosnia & Herzegovina and Republic of Croatia, as a sign of good will in implementation of the Washington agreement, agreed in mid November 1995 to initiate a pilot project on return of refugees.

From the American town called Dayton, where negotiations about the general peace agreenment took place, a demand was sent for return of a hundred of each (the total of two hundred) families to Travnik, Bugojno, Jajce and Stolac, that is, towns where at the time (but it is still the same) the population was almost entirely single-ethnic (Croatian or Bosniac). This was supposed to show cooperativeness of the ruling federal partners (SDA and HDZ), but also to confirm that joint life was possible.

Although the pilot project was planned to last only two months (the end of 1995), it has not been implemented to this day. Only Travnik allowed return of a hundred Croat families in the planned, two-month period. The others were doing it individually, under pressure, with international mediation, and so slowly that all deadlines were exceeded. According to information published by the UNHCR in January this year, two hundred Bosniac families returned to Jajce, 148 Croat families to Bugojno, and not a single one to Stolac.

Apart from Mostar, Stolac and Bugojno seem to be the most sensitive points in Croat-Bosniac relations. In Stolac, houses prepared for return of the Bosniacs were set on fire few times, the local inhabitants would not hear of the return of the former inhabitants, and ruins of houses have been "adorned" with graffiti saying THIS IS CROATIA for years. In Bugojno, swords are crossed because of power firmly seized by the SDA and even more firmly carried out by the mayor, Dzevad Mlaco. The attempt of agreement of the federal partners about the destiny of the city has failed for the third time already, and the mediator for the Federation, German Christian Scwartz Schilling, said: "Only God can help you" when he was leaving town where all his efforts to establish peace between the ruling parties had gone up in smoke.

Although Stolac, Bugojno and Jajce have suffered sanctions imposed on them by the international community for quite some time, therefore although for quite some time not a single dollar or mark from donors has reached these towns - relations between the partners have not improved, and return of the banished persons and refugees has not even begun.

Relations between the Croats and the Serbs are no better. A month ago, organized return of the Serbs to Drvar was agreed, but just a night after it was officially announced that some Serb families would return to this town, "unknown perpetrators" set twenty houses planned for their accommodation on fire. The investigation like in all similar cases has not been completed, and the Croats from Drvar claim that "there will be no organized return of the Serbs". They also say that individual requests might be considered. It is hardly probable, though, that banished persons will dare return individually. Several thousand banished citizens of Drvar expressed readiness to return to their native town.

All these examples indicate a single simple conclusion that until issues of displaced persons inside the country are resolved, return of refugees who are abroad for the moment is completely out of the question. While "everybody is living in somebody else's homes" and while they are safe only where their "nation is the majority nation" it is hardly probable that refugees will have where to return.

According to data from January this year, in countries established after dissolution of SFRY, there are 446,638 refugees from Bosnia. Out of that number, 177,835 are in Croatia, 10,240 in Slovenia, 5,000 in Macedonia, and 253,383 in FR Yugoslavia. At the moment, there are 631,542 refugees from Bosnia & Herzegovina in European countries.

By the end of this year, at least a hundred thousand people should return from abroad, and it is clear to everybody that there is no possibility whatsoever to receive and adequately accommodate them. In the existing 95 collective centres on the territory of the Federation and about 65 in Republica Srpska, there is almost not a single vacancy. It was announced two years ago that they would be closed, and it would have been done if it had been possible to accommodate all these people. Opening of new, transit centres was planned where refugees would be able to stay for 48 hours at the most after arrival in the country.

Bosnia & Herzegovina still has to meet its refugees face to face. Only a small number of them will return with their savings, expensive cars, machinery for opening factory plants, ideas for small enterprises. Majority of them will be bringing back bundles they had run away with from their homes in 1992.

Sandra KASALO