Kosovar Refugees and B&H

Is There Any Help for the Helpless?

AIM Sarajevo, 2 October, 1998

After numerous speculations about the possibility of making a profit on the tragedy of Kosovo, on the personal level - by personal engagement in the armed conflicts in Kosovo, B&H started dealing with new speculations connected with this region - how many refugees from Kosovo had come to B&H and why did they come here of all places, but also what can B&H do for them. About the latter, we did not succeed to talk with Haris Silajdzic, co-chairman of the Council of Ministers of B&H, who spoke about this problem the most of all. Either this topic is not interesting for him, or the journalist and the media which this journalist belongs to are not interesting for him, or the reason for it is that we are not a television station, and he is said to like to appear on TV, or... but that is how things stand.

According to data of the official authorities, between six and eight thousand refugees have come from Kosovo, and according to less official data there are 15 thousand refugees, but the Association of B&H Albanians, or the Albanians who live in B&H assess that there are much more of them, because there are almost 15 thousand Albanian families living in B&H. Therefore, if every one of these families received somebody, the former figure would be much bigger. With its 800 thousand refugees abroad and almost 1.5 million in the two entities, B&H itself has very serious problems and it cannot help them, so another 15 or who knows how many thousand people from Kosovo is a new problem for the authorities which have not been especially engaged about the Kosovar refugees, with the pretext that no adequate legilature exists for it. The fact is, however, that at the inconvenient time before the elections, nobody in the Federation wished to take this hot potato in order to avoid any possible misunderstanding with the other entity because of it, and nowadays, representatives of the ruling parties in the Federation claim that resolving of the problem of refugees from Kosovo has three keys and that they are in various hands

• in the hands of B&H Serbs, Croats and Bosniacs, and that it is very difficult to reach a concensus about the use of these keys. The question of responsibility has been turned into a vicious circle by the authorities on all levels of the state in B&H - if some agreement is reached on the state level, it is not resolved on the federal level, accompanied by mutual accusations of political partners in the Federation for obstruction. Only in the past few days, the ruling Party of Democratic Action (SDA) issued a message to ethnic Albanians "to draw a lesson from the war in B&H and not to leave Kosovo, but to preserve it".

What is forgotten is that by signing the Dayton peace agreement, B&H has automatically become a signatory of a series of conventions, among other, the one according to which it must offer all possible aid to refugees. For the time being this aid can be brought down to giving two transit centres which were used by B&H refugees who were returning from Western European countries and which were almost empty. That is all, along with frequent complaints of representatives of B&H refugees that this jeopardizes the return of B&H refugees to the country. "They keep forgetting that there are 11 refugee centres in B&H and that almost 50 per cent of these facilities are empty", said the representative of UNHCR a while ago.

The other Kosovo refugees, a much larger number of them, sleep in parks, entrance halls of buildings or homes of those who were kind enough to lend them a part of their own "roof above their heads" for a few days or at their relatives' who live here, but mostly in cities in the Federation, requesting from the local authorities to provide accommodation for them and to give them jobs, mentioning "empty houses and apartments in Sarajevo", for example, or in B&H.

Certain sources close to the international community claim that the government of B&H, that is, the Council of Ministers, received financial aid to provide for the refugees from Kosovo, but co-chairman of the Council of Ministers, Haris Silajdzic, resolutely denies that B&H government has received such aid. But the real truth, according to UNHCR, is in the fact that in the beginning of its fiscal year (March-April), it transferred money "for providing for refugees" to B&H government. To the question put to the representative of UNHCR - for what refugees, the answer was that it referred to all those who were refugees pursuant the 1951 Convention. It would be interesting to hear a comment of the co-chairman of the council of ministers Silajdzic, but, as mentioned, we were not interesting enough for him.

Activities of UNHCR concerning refugees from Kosovo can be brought down to statements for the media of various representatives of this international organization, such as - we have no money for aid to these refugees and, since B&H is a signatory of the Convention on refugees, let it cope with its obligations on its own. The background of this stand of UNHCR which had until some twenty days ago, distributed aid to Kosovo refugees and since a few days ago is assisting them only with food and finding accommodation is a fact that B&H, after the arrival of NATO troops and signing of the Dayton peace agreement, has become a safe country, which does not produce its own refugees any more, so it cannot be a transit country as expected by Kosovans, but it cannot provide the means for aid to refugees from the "third" countries who are arriving here, for the same reason - because B&H is a safe country and signatory of a series of conventions, so it has its international obligations. But in B&H, apart from frequent declarations that "B&H will receive refugees from Kosovo and that it must do it", it is doing practically nothing else.

Ten days ago, Kosovans broke into the abandoned Coca-Cola plant in Hadzici near Sarajevo, and they are living there in extremely improvised conditions, with no medical assistance or anything else. It is possible to learn only from unofficial sources that the authorities give secret instructions, for instance, to outdoor patient clinics, to receive Kosovars for medicl examinations, but not to register them. Quite unofficially, from a source close to the UNHCR, it is possible to learn that it would have been good if clinics would at least do that, but that according to information available to UNHCR which is in contact with refugees, they are offered no medical assistance at all.

However, one question remains open - why are refugees from Kosovo rushing to B&H, the country which three years after the war has not resolved a single problem of its own. Primarily because it is possible to enter B&H only with the identity card and after paying 100 German marks for a family of four, say the Kosovar refugees. At the same time, according to the words of many Albanians who can be met in the streets of Sarajevo, and according to allegations of activists of the Association of the Albanians in B&H, the propaganda is very intense in Kosovo that the international organizations, such as UNHCR and similar, organize transportation for refugees from Kosovo via B&H to third countries, in Europe and on the other side of the ocean. Some journalists tend to claim that the reason is, in fact, rounding off the plan of ethnically cleansed territories. Since a few days ago the deadline for applying for return to prewar homes was expiring

• it would have been easier to resolve this problem - in Serbia and Republika Srpska there would have been just B&H and Croatian Serbs, refugees who had fled there during the war, and Kosovo Muslims would come here, and carrying out of the great plan of ethnically cleansed territories would have continued. This seems probable when one sees with what an amount of dicontent the federal government accepted the prolonged deadline by UN high representative for B&H. Further evidence for such a conviction is the recent statement of the president of B&H League of refugees and displaced persons, who claims that some of the Kosovar refugees believe that this is the result of a secret political agreement beween Milosevic and Nano, aimed at intentional sending refugees from Kosovo to B&H in order to further unstable the already unstable situaton over here. The one who might spoil this plan is UNHCR again. UNHCR cannot send Kosovar refugees from Serbia to third countries because state of war has not been proclaimed in Serbia, and countries of Europe do not want new refugees from the Balkan, they are already tired of those from B&H, and by the way - intensive peace negotiations are going on in Yugoslavia. Indeed, UNHCR is involved in this issue because what it can do is return Croatian Serbs to Croatia under the pretext that state of war is being prepared in Serbia and Croatia is a safe country, and that is how the grand plan of "ethnic cleansing" falls to ruin.

According to the definition, a refugees is every person who leaves her or his place of residence because her/his life is in danger. A large number of men at the most active age - between 20 and 50 - have also come from Kosovo to B&H, therefore men who could be considered to be deserters, but since the Liberation Army of Kosovo (OVK) is not a legal armed force of Kosovo, and Serbia has not mobilised its army but only the "police", so there is no war over there, and there can be no deserters, but they are all just refugees, and therefore even all those strong and healthy Albanians who are now looking for a state which will take care of them, and who are starting with B&H in their search, Assistant minister of communication and civilian issues in the Council of Ministers of B&H recently said that these refugees mostly seek citizenship, a place to live in and jobs, which is impossible to provide for them in view of the situation in B&H and the existing legislature (it is necessary to live in B&H for at least eight years in order to apply for citizenship). But, even if B&H had been a "normal" country, it would not have been able to receive all the refugees who are coming, and not to say anything about the mentioned men of working age of about 30. An interesting illustration is the statement of one of them, a man in his prime for military service, made in mid July that he had not had a bath for 20 days because he was not lucky to "get hold of" some warm water. In a tv reportage, a refugee says: "They did not give us any milk, nor did they provide accommodation for us, so if they do not give us accommodation by this evening, we will leave". So why don't you, a less kind reporter would say. But, men in B&H should not forget that they too have just emerged from a war tragedy in which they were utterly helpless, so never should the event of a few days ago be repeated when a three-year old baby who was vomitting blood was sent back from the gate of one of the departments of the Kosevo Clinical Centre in Sarajevo, with the explanation that the doctors had orders to refuse to help refugees from Kosovo (or asylum seekers from Kosovo - as they tend to call them here).

For those who are curious what happened to the baby - it was saved by a member of UNPROFOR from the German unit who took the half-dead child in his arms and took it to the SFOR hospital where it received medical assistance.

Rubina Cengic

(AIM Sarajevo)