SERBIA & MONTENEGRO: Plea For Refugees’ Right To Choose

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Oct 25 2004 (IPS) - For more than a decade, the problem of refugees in Serbia was only expressed in numbers, exploited by politicians or simply put aside.

But UN and European experts are now pleading for a ”durable solution” that envisages the refugees’ final integration into Serbian society, or their return to lands of origin. In either case, refugees must have ”the freedom and the right to choose what is best for them”.

”Serbia is the country with most refugees in Europe,” says Dario Carminati, director of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Belgrade. ”It is (therefore) necessary to find a permanent solution for them, the one that will not deprive them of the right to a free choice.”

Carminati participated in a conference on Solutions for Refugees and Displaced Persons, organised by UNHCR, the Danish Refugee Council and the Serbian Office for Refugees Oct. 15-17 in Belgrade.

Although most of the refugees came to Serbia in the 1990s, little was done to improve the status of 500,000 unfortunate people – neither under the regime of Slobodan Milosevic nor after it was ousted in 2000.

”It’s high time we worked out a proper strategy,” speaker of the Parliament of Serbia and Montenegro Zoran Sami told IPS. ”But this is a problem we can not solve alone, we need decisive efforts and aid from the international community.”

Serbia is a country with a population of 7.4 million people, of whom some 500,000 were not born there and came to the country as refugees and internally displaced persons.

But they are all ethnic Serbs, victims of wars that led to the disintegration of former Yugoslavia. Out of 500,000 refugees, some 180,000 come from Croatia and 100,000 from Bosnia, where wars began in 1991 and 1992 respectively and ended in 1995.

The remaining 220,000 are the so-called displaced persons, Serbs from Kosovo. In 1999, they fled the southern Serbian province after the United Nations (UN) administration and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)- led peace troops entered the province. Their exodus came after 11 weeks of NATO bombing of Serbia due to its repressive politics against two million ethnic Albanians. Serbs fled Kosovo fearing reprisals by Albanians.

According to UNHCR statistics, only some 60,000 Serbs have returned to Croatia since mid-1990s. Those returning to Bosnia number some 100,000. Hardly any Serbs have gone back to Kosovo. The refugee status and the displaced persons status mean free health care and monthly rations of food but no promise of jobs or final settlement.

Most refugees are working in the so-called grey economy, pay for rented housing and dream of the day when the paper work for sale of their private property is finished back home so that they may finally settle in Serbia. But it is a slow process.

”For years, those people have been treated as a burden,” Professor Zvezdan Djuric told IPS. ”Mostly they fled their homes with bundles and clothes and little money.”

According to Djuric, the fact that some refugees did have substantial capital to start their own business had no direct consequences for their lives.

”Serbia lived in total isolation and under sanctions and most of that money was spent on mere survival,” he said. The isolation of the 1990s and NATO bombing of Serbia have devastated its economy, barely in revival since 2000, when Milosevic fell from power.

Other experts stress that it is not only Serbia that has problems with refugees.

”In the 90s, the Balkans saw the largest migration after World War II, as complete families were relocated from one area to another,” Belgrade University professor Milena Spasovski told IPS. ”We’re talking here about more than two million people.”

Not only hundreds of thousands of Serbs, but also a large number of Muslims fled Serb or Croatian-controlled parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war, intending to re-locate in the area where their ethnicity prevailed or leaving for third countries.

About one million people (or a quarter of pre-war population) of all ethnic backgrounds from Bosnia (Croats, Muslims, Serbs) never returned to their homes after the war ended in 1995. It is a scarcely populated country now.

”In political sense, the wars have led to the creation of ethnically cleansed states,” said Borka Pavicevic, head of the prominent Belgrade Centre for Cultural De-Contamination. The NGO works in favour of truth and reconciliation among the warring nations of the 1990s. ”That is something that the international community is turning a blind eye to.”

But there are success stories among refugees. One of the biggest private companies that manages Belgrade’s public transportation is owned by Saric brothers who came from Croatia ten years ago. It is now a multi-million dollar business that began at the time when Belgrade authorities had no money to keep the public transportation system afloat.

The policy of the company, which runs several long lines in the two million capital, is to employ refugees.

”It means returning the self esteem to ordinary people, help them provide for their families,” says Milan Saric, one of the brothers. This way they tend to put aside the fact that many regard them as second-rate citizens, says Saric.

And that is what life for most of the refugees sums up to.