By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Sep 14 2007 (IPS)

Serbia is finalising the procedure for signing the strategically important Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with the European Union (EU) as soon as possible, but several obstacles are still in the way.

After one of the key rounds of talks leading up to the SAA earlier this week, the head of the EU Integration Office Tanja Miscevic and Vice Prime-Minister Bozidar Djelic both said that “Serbia was firmly on the road to the EU access, which was and remains the most important political goal of the country.”

The SAA, an instrument of the 27-member EU, is for countries that aim for full membership. It comprises sets of regulations that aspiring EU members have to fulfil in terms of political, economic, trade, or human rights reforms.

In exchange, the countries are offered tariff-free access to some or all EU markets (for industrial goods and agricultural products) and financial and technical assistance.

Still, before Serbia signs the SAA, several issues remain to be solved. Apart from the two most sensitive – handing over the last war crimes indictees to the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Belgrade’s more relaxed approach to the status of southern province of Kosovo – there is an issue that is rarely mentioned in public.

That is the issue of the return of its nationals – those either born in Serbia or its passport holders – who entered the EU without proper visas.

The returnees are expected to begin re-entering in the next few months but no big plans are being drawn up to receive them in Serbia.

“There are no exact numbers of how many people are illegally residing in the EU countries, as some of them have started to return voluntarily,” the head of Passport and Re-admission Department of Serbian Interior Ministry, Zorica Rakic Milosavljevic, said at a recent round table dedicated to the issue.

The illegal flow of Serbian citizens to the EU dates back to the ‘90s, to the wars of disintegration in the former Yugoslavia. This led to years of international sanctions and oppression under the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, who fell from power seven years ago.

Most people who fled the country at the time failed to regularise their status. They had entered the EU countries either completely illegally or with outdated red passports of the former Yugoslavia, which had allowed entry into the EU without any visas until autumn 1991.

Once they are recognised as illegal, they are issued a deadline to leave, and provided with temporary travel documents that bring them back to Serbia.

It is widely estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 people from Serbia are illegally residing in the EU countries, most of them in Germany, Holland or Italy. They are not all coming back at the same time, but through a process of re-admission that could take years. Some have already returned voluntarily, while some will be deported to Serbia.

A scrutiny of the voluntary returns so far show that the largest group of illegals from Serbia are Roma. They make some 63 percent of those who have come back in the past couple of years. The most recent statistics of the Serbian Interior Ministry show, apart from this, that between 1,000 and 1,200 have returned each year since 2003 when records dealing with this issue were first introduced.

But Serbia is far from prepared to handle the large numbers of its people who are going to return. The Office of Human and Ethnic Rights of the government of Serbia, which is in charge, is understaffed with only 10 people. The office is funded through donations, as no money has been allocated in the state budget for the returnees.

“There are indications that the state budget for 2008 will comprise some funds for the returnees,” Zoran Panjkovic from the Office told Belgrade Radio B92.

An office for re-admission has been opened at Belgrade airport, where returnees are able to obtain only basic information and legal consultation. The government is to adopt the Strategy for Re-Integration of Returnees only by the end of the year.

“For the time being, the re-admitted get a small sum of money at local social care centres once they arrive at their places of origin. They are allowed to use soup kitchens,” Panjkovic added.

However, the rest is mostly up to the returnees or their relatives, if they have them. Issues such as temporary housing or jobs are not being offered.

“These people (the returnees) face enormous problems once they come back,” head of the prominent non-governmental organisation (NGO) ‘Group 484’ Miodrag Shrestha told IPS. “They often come to Serbia with only couple of dozens of euros (dollars) in their pockets, facing uncertainty in every area.”

The Group 484 became prominent for its role in looking after refugees that flooded Serbia during the years of war.

The NGO has already started aid projects in 10 centres for returnees all over Serbia, including the first pilot-project in the Belgrade municipality of Palilula. Hundred returning Roma families were settled there, with assistance of the NGO and foreign donations.

Activists of Group 484 have found out that almost all those who returned need jobs, 75 percent need housing; a third need assistance to enrol children into Serbia schools, while 18 percent need constant medical care.

“It seems that the state is completely unprepared for this; the burden of accepting the returnees will fall onto the NGO sector,” Shrestha said.

To many, this resembles the situation of the ‘90s, when hundreds of thousands of refugees from the wars were mostly left to the care of their relatives and to NGOs.

But this time, the stakes are higher for Serbia. Successful re-admission means putting the country on the so-called “white Schengen list”, that will permit visa free travel to the EU countries for Serbian citizens after a 16-year break.

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