Refugees Magazine Issue 114 (Balkans) - A Decisive Year

Hundreds of thousands of people are still waiting to go home, but time is running out in Bosnia

By Ray Wilkinson

The bloodstains from the massacre have seeped forever into the cold concrete floors of the farmhouse cellar and stairwell. Amra points almost distractedly to the telltale signs of death as she remembers the Croat attack on the village of Ahmici in central Bosnia in April, 1993. She ran out of the building and into the nearby woods as the Croat gunmen, some of them neighbors for generations, burst into the hilltop village in the first blush of dawn.

More than 100 persons were killed in a one hour massacre by the marauding thugs, elderly, retarded and children alike. The youngest was a three-month-old baby burned alive in an oven. The oldest was 96-years-old. Nine persons were slaughtered and their bodies burned in Amra’s own home. When British soldiers uncovered the attack and television footage flashed the horror around the world, Ahmici instantly became one of the most infamous atrocities of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

Today, Ahmici is again a symbol. An experiment being carried out there and in hundreds of other regions which are trying to knit together old communities will eventually determine whether Bosnia and Herzegovina can ever forge a viable and lasting peace among its ethnic groups.

The area around Ahmici and the nearest large town of Vitez had been predominantly Muslim, or Bosniak, before the war, with a sizeable Croat minority. As the fighting turned increasingly bitter and many communities, Serb, Croat and Bosniak, tried to carve out ethnically pure enclaves, villages such as Ahmici became killing fields. Today there is a new reality in the Vitez area bearing testimony to the results of those wartime campaigns; the majority of the population is Croat with a minority of Bosniaks.

Despite this reversal and the obvious dangers posed if hostilities ever resume, Amra (not her real name) and around 150 other Bosniaks earlier this year put their nightmares aside and returned home after living for five years as virtual nomads. UNHCR and other international agencies helped renovate several dozen village houses, providing new roofs, windows and stoves to facilitate the villagers return. Twelve children have begun attending school in a basement.

“I am happy simply to have survived,” the 43-year-old Amra says, eventually breaking into tears as she recalled the earlier attack. “You know, my father-in-law was an invalid who could not run away from the attackers. And three young girls were among those killed here. The healing will take time. It will be difficult.”

Croat municipal officials were on hand to welcome the Bosniaks home and an elder, Fuad, said the village was further delighted when one Croat was recently

extradited to The Hague to face trial for alleged war crimes in connection with the attack. Other Croat neighbors still live at the bottom of the hill, but the two communities do not speak to each other. Conspicuously, the village mosque which was blown up by the attackers remains a heap of rubble. “Not even the babies will ever forget what happened here,” says Fuad.

A new beginning

Yugoslavia, a nation once considered the most progressive in the post World War Two communist bloc and a founding member of the world non-aligned movement, began to split apart in 1991 as ethnic divisions deteriorated and the Republics of Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from the Federation. War ensued between Belgrade and Zagreb and spread to Bosnia and Herzegovina when Sarajevo also opted for independence in 1992.

Nearly three million people fled their homes at the height of the crisis, 700,000 becoming refugees in Europe and other regions and the rest internally displaced within the old Federation. As the lead humanitarian agency, UNHCR at one point was helping 3.5 million war victims – refugees, the internally displaced and others – with everything from flour, salt and sanitary supplies to blankets, stoves, wood and multi-purpose plastic sheeting. A UNHCR airlift which developed into the longest humanitarian airbridge in history, kept the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo alive through three winters.

But cities, towns, villages and huge swathes of land were ethnically cleansed. As many as 200,000 persons were reportedly killed in Bosnia alone, many of them civilians. The country’s economic infrastructure – factories, bridges, roads, water and electricity plants – were destroyed. Sixty percent of the country’s homes, 50 percent of its schools and 30 percent of hospitals were either reduced to rubble or badly damaged before the worst European war in 50 years was halted and Presidents Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia initialed the Dayton Peace Accords on November 21, 1995 at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base in the United States.

Dayton was to signal a new beginning. Serbs surrendered some of the territory they had captured, establishing their Republika Srpska in 49 percent of Bosnia. An earlier established Bosniak-Croat Federation controlled the rest of the country. Both, theoretically at least, came under a central multi-ethnic authority in Sarajevo. Their armies returned to barracks and more than 30,000 NATO and other international troops arrived to police the peace. A $5.1 billion international reconstruction package for 1996-99 helped rebuild at least parts of the shattered infrastructure. General and municipal elections were held in the last three years and more are planned. Some indicted war criminals were transferred to The Hague to stand trial at the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal.

The key to any enduring peace throughout the region, however, will be the successful return and reintegration of the millions of people uprooted by the conflict. Since 1996 a total of 310,000 refugees returned to Bosnia and a further 250,000 displaced persons went home.

But at the start of 1999, there were still 400,000 Bosnian refugees and 800,000 displaced persons waiting to restart their lives.

Those bald statistics tell only part of the tale. 1998 was declared The Year of Return, but only 100,000 refugees, less than half the official target, went home. More worrying still, during this period only 30,000 people – refugees and internally displaced persons – returned to their old homes in areas which are now controlled by a different ethnic group. Humanitarian officials believe the large majority of the 1.2 million people still waiting to return home fall into this latter category.

Helping these ‘minorities’ has become the most complex and difficult problem facing Bosnia today with deteriorating domestic economic conditions, turmoil in other parts of the region, the continued opposition of extremists in Bosnia and almost impenetrable bureaucratic systems all conspiring to undermine progress.

The year of minority return

Some international officials nevertheless have declared 1999 The Year of Minority Return and targeted 120,000 minorities to go home. Given that only a quarter of that number succeeded in returning in 1998, there is already a lively debate whether the 1999 figure can be met.

“1998 was very disappointing and 1999 cannot be just another year,” one senior UNHCR field official said. “The obstacles to minority return have become clearer and more intractable, but somehow they must be overcome. This may be our last chance. If there is not a major breakthrough in the coming months then we will have to reexamine the reality on the ground.”

A December, 1998 meeting of the multi-nation Peace Implementation Council, the organization effectively overseeing the political and economic rebuilding of Bosnia, recognized the urgency of pushing the process forward as quickly as possible. It approved a two-year package of measures to reform the economy, strengthen government institutions, create an independent judiciary and multi-ethnic police units and encourage the continued return of refugees.

Carlos Westendorp, the international community’s High Representative in Bosnia, was given additional powers to combat the continuing efforts of ultra-nationalists among all the ethnic groups to block progress. “A lasting peace within Bosnia and Herzegovina is starting to take root,” the conference noted, but it added that “there is still much work to be done….and without the scaffolding of international support (Bosnia) would collapse.”

The successful return of refugees and internally displaced people depends on a series of interlocking international, regional and local initiatives. The breakdown of just one link anywhere in the chain could disrupt the entire process.

In a global context, Bosnia receives one of the largest aid packages of any country in the world but huge areas, especially in Serb-controlled regions, remain without water, electricity or homes. The December meeting in Madrid put Sarajevo on notice that this help will not continue indefinitely, but unless the overall economy can be revived and multi-national companies rather than governments convinced to invest in the near future, those areas will remain no-go zones and refugees will not return. Even the fragile peace will last only as long as foreign troops remain, observers say.

Regional political and military developments also directly influence refugee flows. A wider conflict in Kosovo could produce new waves of refugees in Bosnia and further afield, disrupting that country’s own refugee return. Decisions taken in Belgrade, Zagreb or Sarajevo often produce a domino effect throughout the region. If, for instance, national or local governments hinder or block the return of ethnic minorities in one place, this produces a knock-on effect in a second area where other refugees from a different ethnic group, are blocked in retaliation. The same is true because of housing shortages throughout the region — the lack of shelter in one area directly slows return in others.

A mission impossible

On the ground the situation, if not quite Mission Impossible, is nevertheless horrendously complex. Most of Bosnia’s population of four million remains deeply traumatized by the war years, by the death of close family members often at the hands of longtime neighbors, by the destruction of their homes and work places and an entire way of life. Doctors and analysts believe that trying to come to terms with a very uncertain present and future could be even more difficult than the wartime experiences and take many years.

In trying to promote minority returns, senior protection officer Volker Turk pointed out that UNHCR today still has to negotiate with hard-line officials on all sides who were responsible for promoting ethnic cleansing in the first place. Though most of these ultra-nationalists pay lip service to the Dayton Accords and High Representative Carlos Westendorp has the authority to remove troublemakers, they have become skilled in hindering the return process.

“Their weapon is generally no longer the gun, but red tape,” Turk said. “At the very top and at the very start of the process we have to deal with 13 different constitutions and 13 different legal systems, all with their own rules and idiosyncrasies. Then, all the way down from the highest government office in Sarajevo to the local municipality there are opportunities to delay, divert and destroy. We are on constantly shifting sands and bureaucratic warfare is proving more effective even than guerrilla warfare.”

And when administrative maneuverings do fail, extremists revert to terror. Returnees have been murdered in their own homes, beaten up and intimidated and their houses blown up around them (see separate story on page 14). “Without an SFOR tank parked in your front garden and a soldier on the roof, minorities would encounter even more violence,” Turk said in referring to incidents where NATO soldiers have been called in to protect vulnerable returnees.

Recent visits to Bosniak, Croat and Serb communities within the Federation and Republika Srpska highlighted the day-to-day problems in helping minorities and the difficulties they face once they do go back.

Before the war Godinja was a pretty weekend mountain retreat for Sarajevans. It was wrecked during the fighting, but UNHCR and other agencies rehabilitated 22 homes at a cost of around $8,000 each (throughout Bosnia, UNHCR has helped restore an estimated 30,000 family units) to try to kickstart returns to the region.

Serifa Lindov, her husband, son and daughter-in-law together with five other Bosniak families returned to the village located precariously near the so-called Zone of Separation (ZOS) which marks the Serb and Federation entities, but other houses remain empty or are used only as weekend homes. “The school and clinic used to be next door but now the nearest are two hours walk away,” says Serifa in explaining why more of her neighbors had not come back.

The homes were rebuilt months ago but the local Serb municipality only recently reconnected the electricity. A sawmill and several other factories were burned down several years ago and have not been rehabilitated and so there are no jobs. Serifa’s family survives on food handouts from relatives.

There is no public transport and the Muslims must walk through heavy winter snows to reach the now exclusively Serb town of Trnovo and then the outside world. Between Godinja and Trnovo is the destroyed Muslim village of Turovi. For nearly two years UNHCR has been involved in tortuous negotiations with Trnovo’s Serb mayor to promote minority returns to Turovi. In exchange for rebuilding 20 Muslim houses, UNHCR offered to rehabilitate 20 Serb houses, a school and the sawmill.

Moving the goal-posts

But the goal-posts kept being moved, first over which houses should be rebuilt first, then over the numbers of people involved. Bosniak refugees from Turovi later intervened with their own objections. When it became clear it would be too expensive to try to rebuild their former homes, UNHCR offered to construct cheaper prefabricated houses. The refugees refused. Today the sawmill remains closed. Turovi is a deserted shell. The talks continue.

When UNHCR launched its ‘Open Cities’ concept in March 1997, the project met with widespread international acclaim. The idea was simple; towns and municipalities which promoted minority return and reconciliation would be rewarded with international assistance. Thus far, however, only 15,000 minorities have gone home under the program.

The municipality of Vogosca on the outskirts of Sarajevo was ‘derecognized’ late last year because of the authorities slowness in implementing return programs. “The Case of the Homeless Cow” was symptomatic. When refugees want to return to their old homes, displaced persons currently living in that particular building must first be found alternate accommodation. In this particular case the person to be moved owned a cow but his proposed new location did not have room for an animal. He refused to move, the ministry did not insist and avoided discussing the situation with UNHCR officials for one month. Yet another refugee transfer was put on hold.

Banja Luka today is the capital of Republika Srpska, but the town and surrounding areas underwent some of the worst ethnic cleansing of the war. The road corridor between the Serb stronghold and the Federation town of Sanski Most 50 miles (80 kms) to the west even now vividly illustrates the horrors of the earlier conflict and the dilemmas in trying to reconstruct a multi-ethnic nation.

Before the shooting began there were an estimated 60,000 Bosniaks and Croats in Banja Luka. Today there are fewer than 1,000. Every mosque was deliberately blown up and levelled though the rest of the town escaped physical damage.

It is a different story en route to Sanski Most. A freezing, deep fog blankets the region for many days in the winter, reducing visibility to a few yards at times. Disemboweled vehicles, villages still destroyed and abandoned, fields laced with mines, a convoy of heavy British tanks all appear out of the gloom and disappear just as quickly into the murk. For a visitor the overriding sense is one of illusion rather than reality.

Kozarac village looks like a snapshot from the worst bombing excesses of World War Two. Virtually every house has been destroyed. Wild vegetation threatens to overwhelm the ruins of this ghost town. Before the conflict, 4,000 relatively wealthy Bosniaks lived there. To encourage return UNHCR and the Norwegian Refugee Council rehabilitated 53 homes. Thus far, five families have returned.

Among them are Besic and Zumra Osman. They were given 10 minutes to quit their homes by Serb soldiers in 1992 during the ethnic cleansing. When they clambered aboard a waiting bus the village was still a pleasant, tree-lined place where the Osmans and their parents were born and raised. Two weeks after they left, the village was deliberately levelled.

“I had to take pills when I saw what had happened to my home,” the 65-year-old Zumra Besic said describing her return in December. “I was crying out of control. It was as if my entire life had been wiped out.” The Osmans came back with a suitcase full of clothes, one pot and a cooking stove. They live in one room, sleep on the floor of their old home, eat bread and cheese and an occasional potato. There is no water. Serb authorities asked for the equivalent of 25 dollars to reconnect the electricity. The couple do not have any money and instead use two oil lamps for illumination.

“When I first came back I lay awake at night listening and worrying,” the elderly Bosniak woman said. “One house nearby was blown up. But I am not afraid anymore. If they come for me again and I get killed, I get killed.” The returnees are comforted by the nearby presence of Czech soldiers of the international force and the fact that the ‘border’ with the Federation and thus ‘safety’ is only a few kilometers away.

A few streets away from the Osmans, 150 Serbs who fled from what is now Federation territory live in one of the region’s so-called collective centers, in this case a former school. They have been there for three years and are among the war’s most poignant casualties – elderly, infirm and traumatized, often with few close relatives, no independent means of support and with little likelihood or desire to go back to their old homes.

Serb authorities use the plight of these homeless as a bargaining chip to ask international officials how they can welcome back Bosniak and Croat minorities when their own people continue to suffer so badly. In an interview Petar Djodan, Deputy Minister for Refugees in the Bosnian Serb government posed that very question: “How can 50,000 Bosniaks return here at this time? Where will all the Serb refugees go? Where will they live?” But in a region where nothing is as straightforward as it may first appear on the surface, there is widespread suspicion that authorities deliberately keep some centers open just to be able to make that point and slow down returns.

Across the ‘border’ Sanski Most has become an important center for the return process. An estimated 40,000 Bosniaks who formerly lived in what is now Republika Srpska have crowded into the once nondescript rural town, waiting for the moment to go home. Many returned from Germany, either voluntarily or as part of a process humanitarian officials euphemistically call ‘induced’ returns. Authorities on both sides of the line insist they are committed to allowing people to go home, but the process is agonizingly slow.

Bishnu Bhandari, a UNHCR official from Nepal who speaks Serbo-Croat fluently, said funds for some projects in 1998 were late in arriving, hindering the number of people going home. He added that unless the process is accelerated this year, “we will miss the boat” in helping large numbers of minorities return.

Meanwhile crime, black market activities, alcoholism and child prostitution are all on the rise in Sanski Most. Destitute refugees are increasingly being evicted from rented accommodation by wealthier returnees, mainly from Germany. “People arrive here with such hope, Bhandari said. “In Germany they have been told that everything has improved. But nothing has changed. People quickly fall into a pit of frustration.”

Bhandari, like other field officials, has noted other disturbing features of the minority return. The great majority of people who have already gone back are elderly, a trend some local authorities encourage on the assumption that the old are easier to manipulate and the minority population will eventually die out.

“The young will never come back here,” says Zumra Osman. “My two sons have new lives in the city.” Some families split up, sending one or two members to their old home while others stay in wartime accommodation. In that way families could continue to qualify for international aid, but by refusing to give up their ‘temporary’ accommodation they also block the return of minorities from the opposite direction. Others have become known as ‘day trippers’ visiting old homes during the day but returning to a ‘safe’ majority area at night. Some returnees even leave the lights turned on in the evenings to convince humanitarian officials they are living permanently in a new location. Wealthier refugees simply buy residency permits in areas such as Sarajevo where they would now prefer to live.

Indeed, the country’s entire social structure has been turned on its head since the war. Before the shooting began an estimated 61 percent of the population lived in rural areas. Today an equal number live in urban areas and there are indications that at least some of these people do not want to return to village life. One local study suggested as many as 35 percent of Bosnia’s displaced would like to sell their old homes and move to a new location.

UNHCR reduced its operating budget from $87 million in 1998 to $64 million in 1999 and reorientated many of its projects. Funding for shelter projects such as house reconstruction was slashed by two-thirds from $30 million to $9 million, underlining the organization’s decision to phase out emergency reconstruction programs which other agencies will now take over. Increased emphasis was placed on UNHCR ‘core’ projects such as high visibility protection programs including increased numbers of ‘house calls’ and monitoring patrols by protection officers in return areas and monitoring and strengthening court systems, the police and humanitarian institutions.

Senior program officer Kilian Kleinschmidt said UNHCR’s ‘inter-entity’ bus line program which was designed to break down barriers between the various groups by offering free transport to and from different ethnic areas will also be reshaped. In future, the buses will carry people not only internally within Bosnia but, it is hoped, to and from neighboring Croatia and Yugoslavia. Since Dayton, the fleet has carried an estimated 800,000 people annually, a success story which Kleinschmidt termed “one of our most beautiful activities.” He now hopes to replicate that on a regional basis.

Many field workers are convinced they are now in a race against time. Says Barry Rigby, head of UNHCR’s Bosnia operations, “This may be a defining year. It may be our last chance” to make a major impact on minority return. Some European governments are already professing a preference for ‘relocation’ rather than minority return whereby refugees would continue to be encouraged to go back to Bosnia and ‘relocate’ to majority ethnic areas rather than going to their old homes.

Such a plan has one obvious merit; it would be far simpler to implement than trying to help hundreds of thousands of people return to areas where the local authorities now in place don’t want them and at times are willing to resort to violence to stop them. Critics argue the international community would then be complicit in supporting the basic aim of the war extremists in establishing ethnically cleansed mini-states. According to the respected International Crisis Group, Bosnia’s peace is still “built on shifting sands” and in such a situation there are no easy answers.

Source: Refugees Magazine issue 114 (1999)