SOCIETY-BALKANS: Owners Discover Their Homes Sold

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

ZAGREB, Croatia, Feb 3 2005 (IPS) - What the Dupor family had hoped would be the final solution to their problem turned into their worst nightmare.

When the Serb family offered their house in the Croatian Adriatic coast village of Karin Gornji to the Croatian state-run Agency for Real Estate (APN) last September, the agency told them they cannot buy the same house twice.

APN told the Dupors that their 100-square-metre house was sold in July last year, and that the Dupors had been paid some 72,800 dollars.

As it turned out, both APN and the Dupors were tricked. The Croatian agency bought the house on the basis of forged papers, and the Dupors never saw the money.

Investigation on both the Croatian and the Serbian side launched after the scandal broke out last December have found that at least one agency, MiS NS from the Serbian town Novi Sad, was involved in the scheme. Its owner Stevan Pavic (46) was arrested and is in custody.

At APN three agents are under investigation by the Croatian police.

"This is one of the biggest schemes of cross-border theft," Novi Sad police spokesman Stevan Krstic said at a recent press conference. Serbia and Croatia are neighbouring countries, both once part of former Yugoslavia.

Krstic said MiS NS and several other agencies in provincial Serbia forged power of attorney papers and presented them to APN. The Croatian agency accepted them without checking. The money was released to the intermediary with a ‘power of attorney’ and split between APN and Serbian agents. Several million dollars were paid out this way, Krstic said.

"Besides the ‘signature’ of an uncle who died before I was born, there were powers of attorney allegedly signed by me and my mother, who died in 1997," Dragoslav Dupor (59) told IPS.. "The house was all we had, our last hope to solve the problems," he added..

The Dupors are from the 300,000 Croatian Serbs who have been living in Serbia as refugees since 1995. They fled home after the Croatian army crushed the Serb rebellion in August that year. That ended the four-year-long war between the newly independent Croatian state and the rebel Serbs backed by Serbian regime in Belgrade.

"There is no doubt that these people became victims twice," APN head Vladimir Goatti told IPS. "Once when they left, and later on when they fell victims to the fraud."

Goatti who became head of APN last September says no sale can be made now without his personal verification of all documents. The cases of fraud thus far need to be tackled by the judicial system, he said.

Attorney-General Mladen Bajic has taken a special interest in these cases, a senior Western diplomat told IPS. "The problem of illegal sale of Serb homes might look like a sophisticated case of ethnic cleansing, and Croatia does not need that on its road to European Union (EU) membership."

After the war the Serb community in Croatia (pop. 4.5 million) shrank from 600,000 in 1991 to some 200,000 in 2001.

According to official statistics, some 114,000 Serb refugees have returned to Croatia since 1995. But the latest Status Report of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) says that "housing and economic factors are the most important obstacles to return, while administrative obstacles and some psychological barriers also remain and slow down the return process."

OSCE officials say the number of 114,000 represents only the number of Serbs who came back to obtain Croatian papers to regulate property and other problems.

Croatia is due to start EU membership talks in March. That places Croatia under obligation to respect minority rights, particularly those of Serbs.

Head of the Serbian caucus in the Croatian parliament Milorad Pupovac says fraudulent sale of Serb property "is also a grand robbery of the Croatian state budget, as some ten million dollars were skimmed through the scheme that continued unchecked for years."

Pupovac says Serbs left behind some 60,000 homes in 1995. APN bought more than 8,000 of them at a cost of about 200 million euros (260 million dollars).

Pupovac blames institutions on both sides for the criminal scheme. "The police and judiciary both in Serbia and in Croatia were turning a blind eye for quite a long while," he said.

The two countries began to normalise relations only after leaders on both sides who led the nations to war left the political scene. Croatian nationalist president Franjo Tudjman died in 1999, while his Serbian counterpart Slobodan Milosevic fell from power in 2000.

"If Croatia wants to join the EU, it should do it without the burdens of the past, particularly burdens that are not allowed anywhere, both from the legal and moral point of view," Pupovac said.

But for most of the affected Croatian Serbs, the problem is far from being solved.

Police in Novi Sad told IPS that dozens are calling the special phone number published in Serbian newspapers for fraud victims.

"We get calls from all over Serbia, it seems that the cases discovered so far are only the tip of the iceberg," a police source said.