The Balkan region is a bewildering mosaic of hope and despair... While hundreds of thousands of civilians are rebuilding their lives, equally large numbers are staring into the abyss.

by Ray Wilkinson

"It is very difficult to look into the mirror and confront the devil," a humanitarian aid worker said in Belgrade recently. "This is a sobering and perplexing time for us."

She was trying to put into some kind of perspective the rapidly changing and often contradictory developments sweeping across Yugoslavia.

The extradition to The Hague to face war crimes trials of Slobodan Milosevic; the establishment of democratic government; the reopening to the outside world after years of isolation; the hopes for a better future for hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons was the kind of good news which would have been unthinkable only months earlier.

But also on that day, people in the capital were confronted with the first grisly discovery of truckloads of bodies in the nearby River Danube, the 'newest' victims of the 1999 crisis in Kosovo. As many as 1,000 corpses have now been recovered from the river and surrounding lakes, far away from the battle fronts, sparking outrage, anger, denial and simple disbelief among Yugoslavs.

"Just what you see depends on who is looking into that mirror and how they interpret the image staring back," the aid official said shaking her head.

Which is true not only for Yugoslavia. The Balkan region is a bewildering mosaic of hope and despair, of progress and renewed crisis.

The world's greatest powers and military machine, NATO, may have established peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, but it is an uneasy and tenuous kind of stalemate. Long-term success – or failure – ultimately could be governed by small, personal actions multiplied many times over as efforts to return and fully integrate millions of people uprooted by more than a decade of conflict continue.

Incidents like the recent cold-blooded murder of a 16-year-old Muslim girl in a Serbian area of Bosnia can undermine years of patient bridge building between communities. Conversely, the determination of former Serb and Muslim enemies in a tiny village overlooking the once infamous Bosnian town of Gorazde to live together again and share "even each individual piece of chocolate we receive" renews hope that the experiment can eventually work.

THE GOOD NEWS

At least 1.8 million civilians throughout the Balkan region have gone back since the wars began to wind down. The returns ranged from the spontaneous mass repatriation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians to Kosovo within a matter of weeks under the watchful eye of NATO tanks, to numerous individual decisions, of people determined to restart their lives even amidst neighbors they may still suspect of wartime atrocities.

Authoritarian regimes in Yugoslavia and Croatia were replaced by democratic governments. Among their first actions were pledges to resolve ongoing refugee crises.

Between 110,000-120,000 civilians have already returned home in Croatia, and Zagreb insisted other refugees who fled during the 1990s would be fully reintegrated by the end of 2002.

Belgrade relaxed its laws, making it easier for many of its 390,000 refugees to apply for citizenship and stay permanently. Encouraged by those developments, UNHCR High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers said for the first time in a decade there was now a real possibility the refugee problem could be successfully resolved.

The international community signaled its pleasure with Belgrade's flexibility by approving a nearly $1.3 billion aid package to help rescue an economy devastated by years of war and isolation.

The extradition to The Hague to face war crimes of Yugoslavia's former leader, Slobodan Milosevic, opened the way for the further arrests of possibly thousands of other wanted war criminals without which "a genuine breakthrough (toward reconciliation) is not possible," according to Wolfgang Petritsch, the international community's High Representative in Bosnia.

In the central Balkans, virtually all of the 880,000 Kosovars who fled or were forced out of that province in the spring of 1999, returned within months in one of the fastest and most dramatic reversals of fortune in refugee history. Today, Kosovo's roads are clogged with traffic, the skyline of Pristina, the capital, is decked in a veritable forest of television satellite dishes, the landscape is alive with the hammering and banging of reconstruction and one of the largest American bases overseas with the unlikely name of Bondsteel symbolizes the world's security commitment to the region.

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord silenced the guns of war which had killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted more than two million others and destroyed or damaged nearly half a million homes. Five billion dollars in aid poured into the country.

The capital, Sarajevo, has since recovered some of the panache and joie de vivre which helped it capture the 1984 Winter Olympic Games in happier days. The heavily sandbagged airport which became both a symbol of resistance and through which aid poured from the world's longest humanitarian airlift to sustain the city through 3½ years of war, has been rebuilt. The number of NATO troops in-country was sharply reduced to around 20,000.

More than 730,000 Bosnians returned home. Significantly, the number of people going back to their houses in areas where they will now be minorities in that deeply divided land – probably the most difficult and intractable problem in Bosnia – accelerated sharply in the last two years.

Optimists suggested that the legacy of hatred between ethnic Serbs, Muslims and Croats ran so deeply following the war and the basic infrastructure such as homes, electricity and water supplies were so battered, that the progress accomplished in less than six years, while still only a start, was nevertheless extremely encouraging.

THE BAD NEWS

Pessimists viewed Balkan events through a different prism.

Though the wars of the 1990s subsided into uneasy standoffs, another state, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), teetered to the edge of full scale insurrection throughout the first half of 2001 as government forces and local guerrillas skirmished around the capital, Skopje in yet another ethnically-inspired conflict.

The fighting was modest compared with earlier clashes, but relations between minority ethnic Albanians and Slavs deteriorated, the government lurched from crisis to crisis and around 150,000 civilians were uprooted. The majority went to neighboring Kosovo where civilians who only two years before had sought safety in FYROM were now able to return the compliment of providing sanctuary in their own homes for the latest refugees.

Humanitarian agencies drew up contingency plans for a far worse scenario in which hundreds of thousands of people could be displaced by generalized warfare, a development which would jeopardize not only FYROM, but also the security and stability of surrounding states.

Even before this latest crisis, there were still an estimated 1.3 million refugees and persons displaced within their own countries – so-called IDPs – scattered across the region. Refugee officials said it would be increasingly difficult to find solutions for these uprooted peoples compared with those who had already gone home.

Some problems inspired local solutions – Belgrade's decision to make it easier for refugees to obtain citizenship, for instance. Others crisscrossed national boundaries in every direction, particularly the housing crisis which has become one of the worst legacies of the Balkan wars.

As communities fled during the upheavals, whole towns and villages were deliberately destroyed, creating widespread future housing shortages. Homes left standing were distributed among the new 'majorities' as an effective way of reinforcing 'ethnic cleansing.'

Since the shooting stopped, the entire region has been involved in a huge contest of 'musical houses' rather than 'musical chairs' to try to right those wrongs. There has been some reconstruction and repair – 125,000 dwellings in Bosnia have been rehabilitated out of nearly 500,000 damaged or destroyed. International administrators and governments revised, rewrote or tightened property laws, actions which have helped increase the number of people returning home. Demarcation lines were also redrawn in some areas (in parts of Sarajevo until recently, the line between Serb and Croat-Muslim sections cut right through several high-rise buildings, including individual apartments).

But hard-line local officials determined to enforce the status quo or individuals determined to stay or with nowhere else to go, have been adept at delaying or halting the return of minorities to their own properties. The problem has been compounded by people occupying two or more properties and, at the other extreme, of untold numbers of vacant homes deliberately hidden or withheld. Each individual act of going home can involve an exhausting and complicated game of administrative chess played between several groups of people of different ethnicities in different countries.

DAUNTING TASK

Belgrade's decision to promote 'local integration' for longtime refugees as well as repatriation wherever possible, is admirable. But at a time of diminishing humanitarian assistance and a region-wide battle for only a limited number of development dollars, the task of creating jobs for everyone in an economy where unemployment can reach 70 percent, of providing schooling, housing and expensive long-term care for many aging exiles, is daunting.

Ironically, in the short term the situation of most refugees, along with the civilian population as a whole, has gotten worse in this new era of liberalization, with aid often being reduced, prices rising and work still unavailable.

Croatia, despite its promises, continues to suffer a credibility problem among ethnic Serb refugees mulling the possibilities of going home. After visiting both Belgrade and Zagreb recently, High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers said there was a widespread perception among the refugees that there was "not the political will" in Croatia to welcome them back. "This is still part of the tragedy of the past," he said.

And while Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population recovers from its own 1999 exodus, the 230,000 ethnic Serbs, Roma and other minorities who fled or were forced out when the Albanians returned, now live in collective centers, camps and private homes on the fringes of the province, increasingly frustrated by their life in limbo.

A few have ventured back, but there appears little hope that large numbers will go home anytime soon. "The Albanians went home in two months," one angry Serb told a visitor recently. "We have been here two years. Why are there good rules for the Albanians and bad rules for the Serbs?"

Things have improved in Kosovo compared with the inflammatory aftermath of the return of the Albanians when minorities were openly threatened, beaten, thrown out and often killed. One high-ranking refugee official in Pristina judged that, "The era of shoot 'em, bomb 'em and burn 'em has ended. And there's light at the end of the tunnel which may not be an oncoming train."

But despite that assessment, security remains a problem. Eleven Kosovo Serbs were killed earlier in the year during an attack on a bus. Orthodox churches are ringed with barbed wire, armored personnel carriers and guarded by soldiers of the international force, KFOR, to prevent their destruction. Minority enclaves are similarly protected – whether a Serb village high in the hills or a group of ethnic Albanian apartment buildings in the Serb dominated section of Mitrovica town.

Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica vowed that "there is not a single door that I will not knock on" to solve the refugee and other problems, but he also warned a recent summit meeting: "The old Balkan story of violence and ethnic cleansing is not yet over."

In Bosnia, the yardstick of minority returns is encouraging, having accelerated rapidly in the last 18 months to nearly 100,000 people. Udo Janz, UNHCR's deputy chief of mission in Bosnia, believes the pressure to return is increasing. "In one sense, the returns are unstoppable. People are fed up," he said. "They just want to go home. They have switched off from the incessant propaganda and are trying to re-establish themselves against all the odds."

But those odds remain formidable. The minorities represent around 13 percent of total returns in a region which once proudly boasted of its mixed population. The country remains deeply divided between Republika Srpska and the Croat-Bosniak Federation. Hard-line nationalists still dream of their own entity or federation with Croatia. Civilians who do go back to sensitive areas face harassment, including killings, beatings or more subtle pressures including excessive taxes, lack of job opportunities or restricted education facilities for their children. And with bitter irony, at the very time when minority returns have increased, the funding needed to sustain the movement has become more difficult to find.

HOPES AND FEARS

A recent journey through the region and visits with individual refugees highlighted all of these contradictions – the hopes of return and the fear of permanent exile, the passions and continuing animosities, the resilience of refugees and a wonderful generosity of spirit from people least able to materially afford kindness.

The rump Yugoslav state and Croatia are both at a crossroads. Each has installed democratic governments, restored their ties with the international community and promised to quickly tackle the refugee crisis. Expectations were raised, but in the short term at least many things have only gotten worse.

In Serbia, industries crippled by the war and a worldwide embargo remain gutted. Unemployment is as high as 70 percent in some areas. Many of the estimated 390,000 refugees from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina have seen their assistance progressively reduced. UNHCR slashed its own budget from an originally estimated $65 million in 2000 to $27 million in 2002.

Slobodan Pupovac and his wife Danka, were among the 60 percent of refugees recently canvassed who opted to accept the government's offer to integrate locally rather than return to Croatia which they fled in 1995. This issue presents the U.N. refugee agency with a difficult balancing act to follow – promoting return for those who want to go home, but at the same time helping local integration for those who wish to stay.

Pupovac, a powerfully built man and an ethnic Serb, salvaged a truck and tractor as he abandoned his Croatian home and trudged 700 kilometers in 12 days, meandering across Serbia until his family finally settled near Belgrade. He bought a plot of land and began to build a house, selling off his truck, part by part, to finance the future.

In 1997 Pupovac was hit by another truck. His spine was shattered and he has been wheel chair bound ever since. With three small children, an ill father-in-law and an invalid husband to care for, Danka does not have time for other work. They raise a few animals, but rely mainly on the goodwill of neighbors and aid agencies to survive.

The family elected to stay in Serbia and he recently received his citizenship. Would he ever go back to Croatia? "No," he replied instantly. "Everything there was destroyed. My houses were burned down. What is there to go back for?" But later in the conversation he admits, "Perhaps if everyone else went back, we would think about it." This ambivalence surfaced repeatedly in talks across the region: 'No', but then 'maybe' if things improved in Croatia.

There was ambivalence, denial and hostility among Serb refugees about the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic and the Kosovo atrocities which continue to surface. "We all expected something to happen after Milosevic left," said Pupovac. "Well, something has happened. Electricity prices shot up and the children's allowances have been slashed." Another refugee in southern Serbia said angrily: "Was Milosevic the only one to commit crimes? What about the Albanians, the Croats, the Muslims? They were all guilty. He should not have been extradited." His neighbors nodded in agreement.

Dusan Karapandze, his wife and three children did return to Croatia last year, only to find their home in the village of Majske Poljane occupied by a Bosnian Croat settler. The Karapandzes moved into a small shed on the property and submitted an application for repossession of their house. "We are still waiting for a decision," he said recently.

Even more galling, the temporary occupant was away, reputedly working in Germany, and when Dusan was found in the house he was charged with illegal entry into his own property.

Similar absurdities abound. One Serb returnee in northern Croatia was denied possession of his home because another temporary occupant used it for his dog.

COLLECTIVE CENTERS

There are 600 collective centers in Yugoslavia – converted factories, hotels, sports centers, office blocks – sheltering 40,000 persons, often the very old and infirm, with nowhere else to go. Conditions vary widely, from overcrowded temporary dormitories with almost no amenities, to simple but clean family accommodation. Moods also vary in these centers, from apathy to anger.

Juplja Stena (Hollow Rock) near Belgrade is a former children's summer resort set among wooded hills. Some Bosnians have been there for a decade.

"Three members of my family have died here, including my husband," one elderly woman said, adding with a touch of awe "but my grandchildren were also born here."

"When we left Mostar (in Bosnia) in 1992 I had a loaf of warm bread in my hand," she said. "Nothing more. When we first got here we thought, 'we will go home soon.' Now there is no hope, especially for us old people. There is not one day that I do not cry," she said, beginning to sob. "There is no joy for me, no future."

The longer people stay in such centers, where they do receive minimum assistance, not only apathy but also dependency takes a firm grip. Many longtime refugees simply no longer have the willpower to make decisions. Some refugees, for instance, hesitate about taking citizenship because it would mean leaving a collective center and fending for themselves.

The residents at the Pension Belgrade and other collective centers in southern Serbia were displaced persons from Kosovo. They have been exiles for far less time than the Bosnian refugees and are full of bewilderment and anger.

"Hundreds of officials and journalists have come here. They have taken our stories, photographed our faces, but nothing happens," one woman at the Pension Belgrade said before turning on her heel and leaving. At a converted sports center in the town of Vranje which houses around 120 people, a visitor was met with hostility. "What has happened to the 1,300 Serbs who were kidnapped in Kosovo?" one person asks. "No one has found their bodies." "Why should we participate in the elections?" another wonders about forthcoming balloting in Kosovo in November. "They are not for us. They are for the Albanians." A little later the visitor is turned brusquely away at the door.

A SUCCESS STORY

When Albanian refugees began flooding back into Kosovo in late 1999, ethnic Serbs, fearing revenge, headed out of the province. Thousands of other ethnic Albanians living in Serbia proper, who had not been directly involved in that crisis, nevertheless became caught in the crossfire of refugee flows and mounting local unrest and they crossed into Kosovo. It was a local mini drama played out against the backdrop of the main event, part of the mad mosaic of movement at the time.

Now, they have begun to head home to Serbia – the first time the Belgrade government, normally vilified for its ethnic policies, openly welcomed the return of a large minority. "Conflict was avoided here when it would have been so easy to slide into total chaos resulting in tens of thousands more people leaving home," said UNHCR field officer Bill Tall as he watched the first 99 returnees clamber from two buses and head for their isolated farmhouses in the surrounding hills. It was also, of course, a calculated political gesture. By encouraging its own minorities to return, Belgrade was in a better position to demand the return of ethnic Serbs to Kosovo.

But even with government encouragement and police protection, these returnees face a difficult future. Their homes have been gutted. "When I left this place, the last thing I did was let the cattle loose," said Hussein Abdijeviq as he looked at the shell of his home and across the beautiful valley down which his animals had disappeared. Doors and windows were ripped away. Exercise books and mattresses littered the floors. One wall was daubed with both Serb and Albanian military slogans. A child's broken bicycle lay in the courtyard.

Hussein was given a few emergency items, a stove, blankets and a few rations on his way home and he prepared to camp out. "I must clean this up before my wife arrives," he grinned through broken teeth. "I'm very happy and sad at the same time. What can I say? I'm home." Similar scenes were repeated in neighboring valleys. (But even success stories can be fragile. Shortly after this visit, unknown gunmen shot dead two local policemen and wounded two others, threatening to undermine the returns and stability of the whole region.)

MAJORITY PROBLEM

In Kosovo, ethnic Albanians who were themselves refugees two years ago, are undoubtedly 'in', Serbs and other minorities undoubtedly 'out'. A United Nations civil administration, UNMIK, backed by KFOR troops, guides the shaky province towards an uncertain future. "In Kosovo we don't have a minority problem," a senior humanitarian official said. "We have a majority problem," referring to the Albanian attitude towards the Serbs.

Within that sweeping and simplistic statement are thousands of individual stories – of Serbs who stayed amidst a sea of hostility; of the few who have since returned; of groups of Albanians in the opposite predicament, trying to survive in Serb majority enclaves and of the sudden arrival of more than 80,000 refugees from FYROM.

Slivovo, an area of eight villages, has the picture-postcard beauty of Switzerland. When four brothers were hanged from a tree in 1999 by Albanian vigilantes, most Serb residents fled. Miro Pavic decided to stay among his vegetables, wheat, corn, fruit trees and cattle.

Swedish troops have built a command post down the hill from Pavic's farm and man watch towers atop nearby hills. UNHCR has organized a local bus to transport the few Serbs in the area through Albanian territory to the 'outside world.'

It is a precarious situation, but Slivovo is considered one of around a dozen areas in Kosovo safe enough to encourage minority return. Miro Pavic keeps a register of all the Serb families who fled and is the main cheerleader for their return. "Fifteen families have come home," he said, but though this trickle back is encouraging, refugee officials acknowledge it is unlikely that the great majority of the 230,000 Serbs and other minorities who left will return anytime soon.

The British government has provided 15 greenhouses both to encourage further return and sustain the Serb community, but this guarded enclave has become "a gilded cage," Pavic said. "We are still prisoners among our vegetables. Security has improved in the last year, but the presence of Swedish troops was still absolutely essential," he said. "I couldn't think of life without them."

FLASHPOINT

Neither could Slobodanka Nojic, a priest's wife in the orthodox cathedral in Mitrovica. Kosovo's second largest town is the effective frontline in the struggle between the province's Albanians who dominate the southern suburbs, and ethnic Serbs who control northern areas. Passions and hatreds are raw and often on public display in Mitrovica and even when it is quiet, one aid official worries "I'm so afraid something will happen. This is too quiet. It's eerie."

The cathedral is in the south of the city, among the Albanians. Greek troops ringed it with barbed wire, sandbags and armored personnel carriers. The church is officially open, but only a dozen people attend services. Priests are accompanied by troops when they leave the compound. Slobodanka Nojic never leaves. "I am too afraid," she said. "And if we tried to leave alone, we would be kidnapped or killed. To be sure, we would never return to this house."

Halit and Zadi Maxhuni have led a similar life in reverse. Ethnic Albanians, they live in the Serb-dominated north. He is almost blind. During the worst of the troubles they spent an entire year in their darkened apartment, the windows covered with blankets, one small radio as their only contact with the outside world, and two friendly Serb women neighbors buying them occasional groceries.

When Halit Maxhuni finally ventured out recently for a haircut, Serbs in the neighborhood silently lined their balconies to watch. When his wife left the apartment for the first time she was overwhelmed: "At first I had a feeling that everything was spinning out of control. And then I saw the sky and sun. It was beautiful."

TUROVI REVISITED

In 1998, this visitor wrote about Turovi village in Bosnia (Refugees n° 114): "For nearly two years, UNHCR has been involved in tortuous negotiations with the Serb mayor to promote minority returns to Turovi. In exchange for building 20 Muslim houses, UNHCR offered to rehabilitate 20 Serb houses, a school and a sawmill. But the goal posts kept being moved, first over which houses should be rebuilt first, then over numbers involved. Turovi is a deserted shell today" under several feet of snow and garbage.

It is one sign of progress in Bosnia that on a return visit, that long impasse had been broken. Sixty homes have been rebuilt. Red tiled roofs glint in the sunshine and window boxes are ablaze with flowers though life is still tough. Muslim villagers are mainly elderly, there are still few farm animals and most people are in similar circumstances to Mustafa and Sevda Dedovic who survive on the equivalent of $50 per month pension.

As this couple chatted about their wartime experiences and their joy in finally returning home, his brother, wife and two sons who had lived in the same village but eventually fled to Sweden, arrived for a surprise visit. "Today life is sweet," Mustafa said even though the lottery of war had been much sweeter to his brother.

Zuko Rasim, another Muslim, moved back to neighboring Trnovo town which became Serb-dominated during the war. He has not been so lucky. When he reopened a bakery there were many Serb customers initially, but hard-line municipality officials intervened, scaring customers away and charging him excessive local taxes. Even children from across the road began avoiding the shop with the sweet smells. "I guess they are just trying to run me out of town," Zuko said.

THE CUTTING EDGE

The views across the Drina Valley are among the most spectacular in Europe. It is an area slashed by deep gorges, forests, and on the higher alpine slopes by fields of yellow, violet, white and pink wild-flowers. The region around Visegrad was a particularly savage battle zone before Serb forces drove out the Muslims early in the war.

Now it is the scene of an experimental return. High up on a mountain slope, a tiny 1950s red Renault car chugs along an overgrown path. Only a few yards away, totally hidden by foliage, lies the destroyed village of Dubocica. Cato Feridjz picks his way down the slope, past crumbling walls and a few weathered picket fences.

He has difficulty in finding his old house, but there, finally, is a fake silver tray among the suddenly revealed ruins. "My mother was shot here. Killed," he said. "She was 80. They burned the house."

He points to a fruit tree. "Slivovitz," a local plum brandy, he says proudly. He picks a wild flower and crushes it into ash before proclaiming, "Tea." The only functioning thing on the mountainside is a pipe carrying fresh water into a trough. Cato strips off and plunges into the icy pool. "My water," he says proudly.

He and the other men who have walked to this village have been given a few blankets and some food, but they are determined to stay amid the ruins and rebuild.

This is the very cutting edge, the frontline of return in the Balkans. Conditions don't get any tougher. If these villagers can survive the rigors of the mountain with almost nothing, overcome the hostility of nearby Serbs and successfully rebuild their homes and lives then perhaps, just perhaps, there is hope for the entire region.

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 124: "The Balkans: What Next?" (October 2001). Download the complete issue (pdf, 2.2Mb) here