YUGOSLAVIA-REFUGEES: Displaced Face Resettlement – Not Return

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Feb 23 1995 (IPS) - If and when peace returns to the war-torn regions of the former Yugoslavia it will not necessarily mean the hundreds of thousands of displaced people living in Serbia who fled their towns and villages, will be able to return home.

The principal reason is that the houses or farms they once owned either no longer exist or are uninhabitable as a result of war damage or indiscriminate destruction by the warring militias in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Many of the larger towns where displaced Serbs, Bosnian Muslims and Croatians used to live have in many cases been totally erased in four years of war.

Their houses and apartments have been destroyed by bombs or villages with mixed populations made ethnically clean by one side or the other. For more than 405,000 people Vukovar, Sarajevo and Mostar and their surrounding areas will remain only a memory.

They are now exiles living in Serbia, trying to patch up their lives and start all over again.

Some 78 per cent of them (323,000) are ethnic Serbs, 8.6 per cent Muslims (36,000), 2.4 per cent Croats (10,000) while the remaining 11 per cent or 46,000 have declare themselves as ‘Yugoslavs’ which means that they come from mixed marriages.

Out of the total, some 1,200 are orphans with no surviving parent and 50,000 are elderly people. The majority fled to Serbia when the fighting in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina was at its fiercest.

The Belgrade regime of President Slobodan Milosevic has always said that the exodus of displaced people into Serbia was evidence of “cruelty against Serbs”. But Serbia proper has done very little to improve the lot of these people or to successfully repatriate them.

Some 90 per cent of the 400,000 displaced people are living with relatives throughout Serbia. They are assisted by international humanitarian organisations who supply food and clothing to needy individuals.

Some of the exiles have found jobs, a rare achievement in crisis- stricken Serbia. Some have turned to smuggling as a way to survive.

All of them have one thing in common — they know the chances of ever going home again are slight. The idea of a Serbian government commission for refugees is gaining ground.

It would be headed by Bratislava Morina, one of the closest associates of the powerful wife of Serbian president Mirjana Markovic. The aim of the commission would be to enable the refugees to settle down in the Yugoslav provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo.

Currently most of the refugees are living in Belgrade and in other big towns of Serbia proper.

Vojvodina is the northern Serbian province, bordering with Hungary. Out of 1.5 million people in Vojvodina, some 300,000 are ethnic Hungarians.

Historically, the villages and whole areas in the province are mostly populated by one ethnic group or the other — with bigger towns having mixed populations.

There are areas without any Serb villages at all or no Hungarian villages at all. Kosovo is a southern Serbian province where 90 per cent of the 2.1 million people are ethnic Albanians.

Morina said recently that at least 100,000 displaced Serbs will be ‘resettled’ in Vojvodina and a similar number in Kosovo.

“I will personally bring bricks to build the houses in Kosovo,” she told journalists. Morina, a Serb, comes from Pristina, capital of Kosovo, which she left to live in Belgrade several years ago.

Morina’s announcement provoked waves of reactions from leading politicians among the Hungarian and Albanian communities living in these provinces. Most of them saw the commissioner’s move as a direct involvement of government into national structure of certain areas.

Dr Janos Adjanski, a local official at predominantly Hungarian town of Backa Palanka, told journalists recently that Morina’s announcement was “a kind of psychological pressure or probing of the public’s response to such overtures”.

Adjanski, who is an official of the democratic alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians (DZVM), the political party of ethnic Hungarians that won the municipal elections in all the areas with predominantly Hungarian communities added: “If the ruling Serbian socialists have decided to push it as a political decision, I have no doubts that they will do it”.

Jozef Kasa, mayor of Subotica, the largest town of ethnic Hungarians in Vojvodina, a DZVM leader himself, thinks that the settlement of Serb refugees in Subotica “would change the ethnic structure” of the area.

The same opinion is shared by highest ranking officials of towns like Senta, Ada and Becej. The ethnic Hungarian officials said the Serbian state had given up a similar plan of re-settling displaced Serbs in 1992 — after being rejected by local, ethnic Hungarian authorities.

The possibility of settling Serb refugees in Kosovo province has caused outrage among ethnic Albanians, as well as among refugees themselves. “No Serb wants to return to Kosovo, even if he was born there. Now they want to push us into trouble,” Stevan S, a Serb refugee from Croatia says.

Although it was not officially announced, rumours circling Belgrade say that the village of Janjevo is designed for first Serb refugees from Croatia to settle.

The village was a Croat island among Albanians for centuries, whose inhabitants were well known craftsmen. Most of them left for Croatia in 1991.