REFUGEES OBSTACLE FOR TOURISM

AIM Zagreb, 11 July, 1997

"I know that those who come for holidays and we do not fit together", a few days ago said Vlado Antunovic, refugee from Bugojno, while he was counting his last hours spent in Imperial Hotel in Vodice near Sibenik. "But, I cannot go with my old mother to Obonjan either. She has never bathed in the sea", he desperately sought arguments for not having to move from Vodice to Obonjan, a tiny island in Sibenik achipelago, on which inhabitants of Zlarin and Kapri for centuries left their disabled donkeys to die. That is how got its name the island of donkeys.

    A new era, in the seventies, brought the youth,

members of the holiday association, to the island the name of which was then changed to the Island of Youth. Then the war began, tourism disappeared, youth started "meeting" in battlefields, and the victims of these meetings replaced them on the island of Obonjan. Those who were less fortunate got stuck over there, and those more fortunate ones were in hotels along the Adriatic coast, like Vlado Antunovic. They must bear the brunt even of the so badly desired peace: tourists can and may come to the Adriatic coast, but they cannot go home. Antunovic must leave his hotel room - the management of the Imperial Hotel has already sold it for the forthcoming peak of the season to the Germans, the Czechs or the Slovaks. Antunovic simply does not fit in in the Hotel's projections of profit of about two million dollars.

The fact that he is not alone in it, will not comfort this man from Bugojno. About 17 thousand banished persons and refugees in Croatia also live in hotels. They occupy almost the double number of beds in order to somehow be able to organize life for themselves, and in some places, such as Icici in Istria, in a hotel of 200 beds there are only 31 banished persons, whom the government Office for Refugees and Banished Persons did not manage to move out before the tourist season.

But, in the Imperial Hotel, the Office managed to implement the government decision about moving refugees and banished persons from some hotels by 1 July, this year. Vlado Antuniovic and another 118 Croat refugees from central Bosnia resisted this decision. And then on 1 July, they were denied board in the hotel.

"And what do we eat? Those who have some money, they buy food, those who don't, they are starving", said an elderly woman from Bugojno. During the years they were forced to spend in Dalmatia, they drew the lesson from the saying: "praise the sea, but keep on land". They refused to even hear about Obonjan.

"We will not live with those who threw us out of our homes", roared the unofficial leader of refugees, Anka Blatancic. Bosniac refugees from western Bosnia are on Obonjan. "Refugees experience every time they are moved as a new banishment", said Blatancic.

"A year has gone by since they refused to be moved and lost the status of refugees by doing it. The school year has been completed now, and we cannot have any more understanding", secretary general of the government Office for Banished Persons and Refugees, Sonja Lovrencic, said in Vodice. Headquarters for resolving the "refugees issue" in Vodice was formed in Sibenik. The involuntary inhabitants of the Imperial Hotel were clearly informed: those who refuse to move out of their own free will, will be moved out by force. The story about impossibility of living with the Bosniacs did not hold. The kitchen remained closed. After return from a reconnaissance visit to Obonjan, Anka Blatancic caught at the last straw:

"There is no school over there, and we have 40 children with us".

"There is plenty of time to organize the school", Nada Klaric from the Sibenik office of the Office for Banished Persons and Refugees, calmly replied.

The refugees were forced to give in. Only about twenty of them went to Obonjan. A part of them, who can afford it, found private accommodation, and a part of them returned to Bosnia. Not to Bugojno, but to Gornji Vakuf. The cry of an elderly woman: "we are also Croats" was of no help. The Croatian Government has manifested a great deal of resoluteness in resolving the "refugee issue" in Vodice. Croatian banished persons whose homes have been reconstructed

• will have to go home or lose their rights of banished persons. Those who cannot go home - will have to go where they are told or will also lose all the rights.

Banished persons and refugees, however absurd it may sound, have enabled hotels and their personnel to survive the barren war years in a specific symbiosis which did not make anyone too happy. Thanks to them and the compensation paid by the state which in time reached 25 German marks per capita, hotels managed to preserve most of their personnel who received salaries such as they were. This price was paid, it is true, by devastation of hotels, but even if they had remained empty they would have been dilapidated. Now that the voluntary nomads are knocking on their doors whose paying power is higher, involumtary "tourists" must leave.

In Split alone, in the once best hotels Lav and Marjan, banished persons from Vukovar and inland Dalmatia occupy a thousand beds. They too will have to go. Generosity in assistance of war stricken persons which ruled at the Croatian part of the Adriatic coast in the beginning of the war in 1991, gradually disappeared in front of the fact that for the impoverished tourist business and not exactly rich state, refugees in hotels are nothing but an obstacle to achievement of the ambitious plan of Croatia to book a profit of two billion dollars from tourism.

However, there are different opinions. "The pressure exerted for some time on banished persons is a matter for daily political purposes, because if the tourist season proves to be a failure, it is known in advance whose fault it will be

• the banished persons", says Petar Visnjic from Potravlje, near Split, himself a banished person for years.

GORAN VEZIC