By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Nov 4 2005 (IPS)

Thousands of Serbs in refugee camps will be ‘adopted’ by farmers in Serbia from this month under a new plan.

The first ceremonies matching the two will be held in the northern Serbian province Vojvodina in the municipality of Bac. The Serb refugees came to Serbia mostly from Croatia and Bosnia after they became independent countries.

The initiative from the new People’s Office of the President of Serbia seeks to resettle thousands of Serbs living in ‘collective centres’ in Serbia. Many have been in those centres some ten years since Bosnia and Croatia broke apart from a Serb-dominated former Yugoslavia.

The Serbs in these centres need a home; the elderly farmers’ families they are moving into need someone to manage their farms. Many of the elderly are unable to look after their land, or themselves.

“After matching some statistics and after we carried out research, we came to the idea that would bring benefits to both sides – the elderly and lonely and those in need of house care, and the homeless, jobless Serb refugees,” Vladimir Pesic from the People’s Office told IPS.

About 12,000 ethnic Serbs live in 130 collective centres. These are mostly half-ruined former camps, abandoned barracks at construction sites, or run down provincial sports halls.

“The people in collective centres have been unable to find solutions and take care for themselves for the past 10 years,” Gordana Logar from the Belgrade research agency Strategic Marketing told IPS. “They are desperate. Most of them relied on state help, but that did not come. They are the most vulnerable – single parents, children born or brought up in those camps, widows, orphans.”

During the wars of the 1990s that broke Yugoslavia, more than 600,000 Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia fled to Serbia. But the regime that dragged Serbs outside Serbia into the war took little care of them. Many had to rely on relatives. Large numbers migrated to third countries.

The situation did not improve much with the fall of the regime of former president Slobodan Milosevic five years ago.

The new initiative is seeking a way out. Half of ethnic Serbs in the refugee centres said they would like to take to farming in the households of the elderly in Serbia. They were mostly farmers or from farmers’ families back home in Croatia and Bosnia.

A survey among 600 households of the elderly in Serbian villages showed 20 percent were ready to take in ethnic Serb refugees.

“It doesn’t look much, but that is a step in the right direction,” Logar told IPS. “Imagine how many single mothers, widows, could bring up their children in a normal surrounding and not in sub-human conditions of collective centres, where even running water is sometimes scarce.”

The 2002 census in Serbia showed that almost 28 percent of it 7.5 million population is above age 65. Most of the elderly live in practically depopulated villages, unable to work the land any more. The young have either gone to the cities in hope of a better future, or migrated.

The refugee problem became the biggest one in the region after the loss of 250,000 lives. Millions were forced to flee their homes, and by the end of the wars in 1995, almost three million were no more in their pre-war homes. Former Yugoslavia had a population of 24 million.

Croatia boasts the best record of resettling refugees, at least on surface. The Croatian Red Cross reported last month that 374,347 refugees or internally displaced persons have returned to their pre-war homes. Croatia has a population of 4.4 million.

Of these, 240,726 were Croats evicted from zones under Serb control 1991-95. The rest are ethnic Hungarians or other minority groups uprooted by war. But the figures for more than 250,000 Serbs who fled Croatia as the war ended in 1995 are disputable.

The Croatian Red Cross says some 133,000 Croat Serbs have returned. But Organisation for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) officials say that number deals only with people who came to Croatia to renew documents and regulate their property rights.

The situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina is very different. At one time in the war, 2.2 million of its 4.2 million people had either fled the country or left for areas under the control of their ethnic group (Bosniak, Serb or Croat).

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) says only 800,000 have returned. Most of these have not gone back to their original place but to the area where that ethnicity prevailed after the war.

Bosnia-Herzegovina remains the only country of former Yugoslavia where no census was held after the end of the war. The population is estimated to be between two and three million, but most people believe it is closer to two million.

“The census is a controversial matter,” a senior official told IPS. “It could show that despite all the noble promises, Bosnia-Herzegovina has not become the country we promised to create ten years ago.”

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