SERBIA: Return May Not Be a Homecoming

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Apr 5 2006 (IPS) - Thousands who fled Serbia through the years of the wars in the nineties are due to return, nobody knows to what.

About 150,000 people who fled Serbia have lived in EU nations illegally for years now.

Most of these people are illiterate and poor, and took whatever manual jobs were available in foreign markets, officials say. Most went to Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Italy.

And most among them are Roma, ethnic Albanians from the southern Serbian province Kosovo, or ethnic Bosniaks from Kosovo or neighbouring Sandzak.

Their demands for asylum were rejected by foreign authorities, particularly after the fall of the regime of former president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. The administrations abroad saw no political or other reasons for them not to return to their native country.

“Since the first re-admission contracts were signed in 2001, citizens of Serbia have been returning to this country at the rate of 8,500 a year,” minister for human rights Rasim Ljajic told journalists.

Ljajic recently opened a re-admissions office at Belgrade airport, where thousands more returnees are due to land in chartered planes this year. The office, with a staff of two social workers and a Red Cross official, was established with an 85,000-dollar grant from Sweden.

“But most of them are people nobody wants,” Danilo Rakic from the Belgrade-based minority rights non-governmental organisation ‘484’ told IPS. “They are being sent back, but have nowhere to go.”

Most of the Roma who return move into slums around the high-rise Belgrade neighbourhood Novi Beograd. The Roma are a minority whose forefathers are believed to have migrated to Europe from Asia since the 14th century..

The slums they inhabit have been built hastily under highway junctions or around dozens of new construction sites. These are the ‘cardboard villages’, and people here take up any manual jobs available.

Most people sent back speak of their return as deportation. Several said they were asked to leave with just 48 hours notice.

A Bosniak from Kosovska Mitrovica town who only introduced himself as ‘H.P.’ fled Kosovo in 1996, and ended up in the Netherlands. His house in his hometown was destroyed in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) bombing three years later.

A non-Albanian, he fears return to Kosovo, where minorities are not welcome despite the presence of United Nations and NATO peacekeepers.

“Where am I to go? There’s no house in Mitrovica…I don’t want to go to (Kosovo capital) Pristina, as I’d be surrounded by ethnic Albanians, who clearly want nobody else around.”

H.P. lives at present with his family in the southern town Novi Pazar in Sandzak region bordering Kosovo. This is an area with a predominantly Slav Muslim or Bosniak population. Like many others, he has no job.

Kadrija Mehmedovic, who heads the Novi Pazar NGO ‘Povratak’ (Return), says particular problems arise over children.

A third of them speak only the language of the country they came from, and are often pushed into schools for children with special needs. Many parents decide not to send their children to school at all.

“Some 40,000 people have been deported to Sandzak since 2000,” Mehmedovic told Belgrade media recently. “They fled poverty some time in the past, but it remains present here.”

Human rights activists point to bureaucratic absurdities in countries that deport the immigrants.

“Absurdities range from one member of a family being approved a residence permit, while others are rejected, so families fall apart as the latter are being deported,” Rakic said. “Besides, there are mixed marriages – spouses come from, say, Serbia and Macedonia. Often they are separated and deported to their separate countries of origin.”

But activists also blame Serbia for doing little or nothing for people who return.

“As far as our citizens are concerned, we have the obligation to re-integrate them into Serbian society,” Sanja Mrvaljevic from the Serbian office for EU Association told IPS. “However, there is strategy to be adopted, and we are waiting for that.”

Until there is a strategy, “hope is the only thing that remains,” H.P. said.