U.S. Committee for Refugees World Refugee Survey 1997 - Bosnia and Herzegovina
With the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords on December 14, 1995, the stage was set for the monumental task of implementing the agreement’s provisions in Bosnia and Hercegovina (hereafter referred to as “Bosnia”) during 1996. By March, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had deployed most of its 60,000-troop “Implementation Force” (IFOR), which successfully separated the warring parties and began to provide the necessary security to edge the Bosnian cease-fire toward peace. On September 14, Bosnians went to the polls and elected national representatives without any major security incidents reported. Notwithstanding these noteworthy accomplishments, the implementation of major aspects of the peace agreement lagged far behind in 1996. Rather than uprooted persons being able to return to their original homes - a fundamental principle of the Dayton Peace Accords - displacements and “ethnic cleansing” continued during the year, accentuating the trend toward ethnic separation and away from the ideal of a single, multi-ethnic state enshrined in the Dayton Peace Accords. UNHCR estimated that as many as 250,000 refugees and internally displaced persons out of a total displaced population of more than two million Bosnians returned to their homes by year’s end, almost exclusively to areas in which their ethnic/religious group was in the majority. This was significantly lower than the 900,000 refugees and internally displaced persons that UNHCR in January had projected would return during the year. As of September 15, 1996, some 75,000 persons, including 30,000 refugees returning from abroad, had gone to Sarajevo. About 60,000 persons (mostly internally displaced persons) returned to the Serb-controlled city of Banja Luka. Zenica and the surrounding area saw about 31,000 returns, and Tuzla as many as 20,000. A further 15,000 to 20,000 persons, most of whom had been refugees in Croatia, returned to the Bihac area. As many as 10,000 Bosnian refugees and internally displaced persons returned to Mostar, and finally about 1,700 internally displaced persons settled in Gorazde. Although UNHCR originally planned for as many as 400,000 Bosnian refugees to repatriate from other parts of the former Yugoslavia and other countries of asylum, mostly in Europe, during 1996, only 21,361 Bosnians had returned home under organized repatriation plans by December 3. The largest number, some 10,484 persons, returned from Croatia. An additional 10,000 Bosnian refugees were estimated to have repatriated independently from Croatia during 1996. Although no exact figures were available, significant numbers of Bosnians also were thought to have repatriated independently from other countries during 1996, as many as 35,000 from Germany alone. Two countries, Germany and Croatia, forcibly repatriated Bosnian refugees during 1996. Germany, host to some 320,000 to 350,000 Bosnian refugees, decided to rescind its policy of federally mandated temporary protection for Bosnians as of October 1, which resulted in the forcible repatriation of as many as 60 Bosnians during the last three months of the year. Croatia, during the first week of February 1996, forcibly returned at least 46 Bosnians from Kupljensko refugee camp to the Bihac area. By the end of 1996, close to half of Bosnia’s pre-war population of 4.4 million remained uprooted by war. About one million persons remained displaced within Bosnia. More than 425,000 Bosnian refugees were living in the other republics of the former Yugoslavia (160,000 in Croatia; an estimated 250,000 in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; 10,400 in Slovenia; and 5,000 in Macedonia). In addition, nearly 600,000 Bosnian refugees were living in other European countries, according to UNHCR estimates given in early December. Despite some progress at rebuilding, particularly in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s economy and infrastructure remained largely in a state of devastation during 1996. Gross domestic product for the year was estimated to be at about 25 percent of its pre-war level, with Bosnian Muslim areas reporting the highest income losses. As of October, some 40 percent of Bosnia’s bridges, 35 percent of its roads, and about half of its power stations remained damaged or destroyed. The shortage of adequate housing remained critical in most areas of Bosnia during the year. Further complicating matters was the presence of millions of landmines and unexploded ordnance throughout Bosnia. All acted as significant barriers to the return of refugees and internally displaced persons. Under the Dayton Peace Accords, UNPROFOR (a UN military force that had been operating in Bosnia) handed over its authority to NATO’s IFOR on December 20, 1995, which deployed international troops on all sides of the conflict lines, established a “zone of separation” between the warring parties, and presided over the transfer of territory between Serb forces and those of the Muslim-Croat Federation. As the year progressed, IFOR also supervised the partial demobilization and disarmament of Bosnia’s three, largely ethnically based armies.
Political Developments On September 14, Bosnians went to the polls and elected Alija Izetbegovic, Momcilo Krajisnik, and Kresimir Zubak to a three-person Bosnian presidency representing Muslims, Serbs, and Croats, respectively. The election results largely helped legitimize the ruling nationalist authorities already in place before the vote. Although the polling took place without violence, monitors reported that as few as 13,500 internally displaced persons crossed the boundary separating the Federation from the Republika Srpska to vote in their former place of residence. Following the vote, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Election Appeals Sub-Commission reported that up to 30,000 internally displaced persons who wanted to vote in their original municipalities in the Republika Srpska may have been prevented or discouraged from doing so due to inadequate security arrangements. Municipal elections, also to have been held on September 14, were postponed until April 1997. The OSCE cited widespread abuse of the electoral rules and regulations at the municipal level as the reason for the postponement. Elections in the divided city of Mostar also were held on June 30, with the main nationalist Muslim and Croat parties winning the majority of votes. One year after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, 67 of the 74 persons indicted for war crimes by the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague remained free. Those who remained at large included former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, the former leader of the Bosnian Serb army. President Karadzic resigned as Bosnian Serb president on July 18, following considerable diplomatic pressure exerted by the international community on the Republika Srpska. General Mladic resigned from the Bosnian Serb army in November. Despite the rhetoric calling for the arrest of indicted war criminals, IFOR appeared to be reluctant to make such arrests, apparently fearing an angry backlash against its troops. Notwithstanding progress in implementing Dayton’s military provisions, relations between Bosnia’s rival groups remained hostile and mistrustful during 1996. Nowhere was this more evident than in the foundering efforts to implement key civilian provisions of the Dayton Peace Accords (such as joint government, freedom of movement, the right of refugees and internally displaced persons to return, and the right of others to remain in their homes), the underpinning of which is the principle of a united Bosnia.
Sarajevo and Mostar The transfer of territory between the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Republika Srpska and the ability of Muslims and Croats to govern jointly within the Federation posed the first critical challenges to the Dayton Peace Accords during 1996. Both issues came to a head in the cities of Sarajevo and Mostar between January and March. Among the most contentious of the land transfers mandated by the Dayton Peace Accords was the return of five Serb-held suburbs around Sarajevo to Federation control by mid-March 1996. The Bosnian Serb authorities relinquished control of Grbavica, the last of the five suburbs, on March 19. But by the time of Sarajevo’s reunification, some 62,000 Serb residents had left those suburbs for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and various destinations in the Republika Srpska. These included Srebrenica, Bratunac, Zvornik, Visegrad, and Rogatica - areas which had Muslim majorities before the war but since had been “ethnically cleansed.” Only about 8,000 Serbs chose to remain in the five formerly Serb-held suburbs after they reverted to the control of the Bosnian government. In the weeks and days preceding and directly following its transfer, Serb-held Sarajevo degenerated into a state of lawlessness, characterized by widespread terror, looting, and arson. Serbs who decided to remain in their Sarajevo homes were subject to systematic intimidation, first from Serb nationalists determined to prevent peaceful coexistence between Bosnia’s ethnic groups, and second by extremists among the Muslim returnees to the suburbs who harassed them and looted their houses with impunity once the Bosnian government authorities had resumed control. These events, said NATO’s Secretary General, Javier Solana, represented a “terrible blow to our vision of a multi-ethnic Bosnia.” International observers blamed all sides for the Serb exodus from Sarajevo and the accompanying devastation of their homes and communities. In February 1996, UNHCR and a variety of prominent news publications reported a systematic campaign directed by the Bosnian Serb leadership to press Sarajevo’s Serbs to leave before their communities reverted to Bosnian government control. “We must not allow a single Serb to remain in the territories which fall under Muslim-Croat control,” said Gojko Klickovic, then-head of the Bosnian Serb resettlement office, whom Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, appointed prime minister of Republika Srpska later in May. But Western officials also said that Bosnia’s Muslim leadership failed to reassure Serb residents of Sarajevo that they would be welcome and their rights respected after the transfer of authority to the Bosnian government took place. Reports of Muslim police standing by as other Muslims harassed the few Serbs who remained in their Sarajevo communities lent credence to fears that the Bosnian Muslim leadership’s commitment to an ethnically mixed Sarajevo and Bosnia had grown increasingly tenuous. UN officials also strongly criticized IFOR for failing to intervene to restore order and prevent the destruction of the five Serb suburbs. As events spun out of control in those communities, NATO spokesmen asserted the right of Serbs to burn their own houses and said that IFOR would not assume police duties. Displacements resulting from the transfer of territory elsewhere in Bosnia foreshadowed the considerably larger exodus of Sarajevo’s Serb communities. In January, some 7,000 Bosnian Serbs abandoned their homes in and around Odzak in northern Bosnia before the area reverted to Federation control. An additional 2,500 Serb residents of the south-central Bosnian town of Borci left their homes for Visegrad in the Republika Srpska. As in Sarajevo, widespread looting and burning took place in these and other areas that were transferred from one side to the other. Events in early February in the divided city of Mostar also highlighted the tenuous relations between Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and by extension the questionable prospects for integration and joint administration of the Muslim and Croat areas that make up the Muslim-Croat Federation. On February 7, Mostar’s European Union (EU) administrator issued an arbitration decision on the city’s territorial organization. Of the seven municipalities in Mostar, the decision proposed allocating three each to unilateral control of Muslims and Croats, leaving the central district of the city to be jointly run. The decision sparked an immediate and violent reaction from Mostar’s Croats, who balked at the idea of ceding authority over key facilities already under Croat control in the central district. About 2,000 Croats took to the streets, ransacked EU offices, and attacked the EU administrator’s car.
No Right of Return The events in the suburbs of Sarajevo and Mostar in early 1996 largely foreshadowed the course of relations between Muslims, Croats, and Serbs in those cities and elsewhere in Bosnia during the rest of the year. Although members of these rival groups had ceased to be at war, few were ready to live peacefully alongside one another. Animosity and mistrust between them, fomented particularly by Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat extremists, was especially pronounced as refugees and internally displaced persons attempted to reclaim their pre-war homes in areas where other ethnicities were in the majority. On April 29, several groups of Muslims attempting to reclaim their homes in several Serb-held towns violently clashed with local Serbs, resulting in at least three Muslim deaths. A group of about 100 Serbs attacked a Muslim convoy of some 250 persons traveling to their former homes in Trnovo, about 18 miles south of Sarajevo, despite an IFOR escort. Some 15 persons were wounded, one of whom reportedly later died, as Serbs battered the convoy with rocks and sticks. On the same day, IFOR troops sought to defuse a confrontation between about 25 Serbs and 300 Muslims attempting to return to their homes in Doboj, about 60 miles north of Sarajevo. Although IFOR separated the rival groups, at least two Muslims were killed, one by a mine, the other by a Serb bullet, as several Muslims attempted to circumvent the Serbs and the IFOR contingent to reach their former homes. Later, in September, Bosnian Serbs in the Republika Srpska town of Prijidor blew up more than 90 Muslim homes and two mosques. In Croat-held Drvar to the south, Bosnian Croats burned down 65 Serb houses during the course of several days. That same month, hostile Croats confronted 30 to 40 Muslims who returned to their pre-war homes in Croat-held west Mostar, demanding that they leave. These were but several in a string of many confrontations in which, to varying degrees, the nationalist authorities and extremists among each of Bosnia’s rival ethnic groups sought to prevent the return of minorities to their pre-war homes. UNHCR introduced a bus service with lines running across the boundary separating the Federation from the Republika Srpska, and arranged for internally displaced persons to visit their home areas. The bus service met strong opposition from the Serb authorities and occasional attacks by hostile Serbs. A USCR representative was present on a UNHCR bus during a confrontation when the bus was stopped by Serb police, and was not able to proceed until IFOR intervened. Nevertheless, the UNHCR-sponsored bus service continued to run with few significant interruptions during the year.
Poor Cooperation As was the case with spontaneous returns during 1996, many of the local authorities in both the Federation and Republika Srpska strongly resisted UNHCR attempts to allow internally displaced persons of minority groups to visit their old homes. In August, UNHCR labeled eight municipalities as particularly uncooperative in this regard: Doboj, Lopare, Prijidor, Teslic, and Zvornik in the Republika Srpska, and Capljina, Drvar, and Sanski Most in Croat-held areas of the Federation. That same month, the OSCE’s ambassador to Bosnia threatened to ban these municipalities as well as the municipalities of Bugojno and Stolac from municipal elections (initially scheduled to be held on September 14 with national elections but subsequently postponed) unless they made “reasonable efforts to promote the return of displaced persons and refugees and to foster other democratic freedoms.” Although UNHCR reported that the ambassador’s threat did exact somewhat more cooperation in these municipalities, opposition to minority returns on the whole remained entrenched in much of the populace and at the highest levels of government in Bosnia. On the question of minority returns, the successor to Radovan Karadzic as de-jure leader of the Bosnian Serbs, President Biljana Plavsic, said that she could not “see any chance for return of minorities to the Republika Srpska. In this sense, Dayton is more theory than anything else.”
Modest Minority Returns Despite intransigence on all sides, 1996 did see a small number of persons return to areas where their ethnic/religious group was in the minority. A pilot project calling for the return of a modest number of Muslim and Croat minorities to their homes within four Federation towns (two Croat-held, two Muslim-held) met with mixed results during 1996. About 500 of the 600 families planned for under the agreement had actually returned as of early October - 200 Croat families to predominantly Muslim Travnik, 202 Muslim families to predominantly Croat Jajce, and 98 Croat families to Muslim-majority Bugojno. In July, USCR traveled to Travnik and Jajce and interviewed returnees to assess their prospects. USCR found their situation to be quite circumscribed, and saw little prospect that the pilot project would be expanded to allow more significant returns in the foreseeable future. Although the pilot project called for a number of Muslim families to return to the Croat-majority town of Stolac, none had resettled there by the end of August. It was unclear if any Muslims had successfully settled in Stolac at year’s end. In early October, some ten months after the returns were agreed to as part of the Dayton Peace Accords, UNHCR expressed disappointment over the inability to carry out fully even the modest number of returns under the four-town pilot project. Despite hostile and sometimes violent opposition, by the end of November, some 1,518 people also had returned to their homes in the so-called zone of separation, the demilitarized area demarcating the boundary between Federation territory and the Republika Srpska. Almost all were Muslims returning to their homes on the Republika Srpska side of the zone. As was the case elsewhere, however, such returnees continued to be subject to harassment, intimidation, and violent attacks during the year. In October 1996, a Bosnian Serb-refugee delegation representing some 20,000 Serbs from Mostar who sought refuge in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the war reached an agreement with the Muslim authorities in Mostar on the reconstruction of homes and return of Serb refugees to eastern parts of the city. About 40,000 ethnic Serbs lived in Mostar before the war. At the time of the agreement, Mostar’s Croat authorities refused to take any Serbs back.
Continued Ethnic Cleansing As members of Bosnia’s rival groups strongly, and sometimes violently, opposed the return of minority refugees and internally displaced persons in 1996, so too were they intolerant of minorities who remained in their midst. Extremists and advocates of ethnic purity, particularly in the Republika Srpska and Croat-held territory, continued to “cleanse” their communities of undesired minorities who remained. In May 1996, Serbs in the Republika Srpska municipality of Teslic waged a systematic campaign to drive out those Muslims who remained there. More than 100 Bosnian Muslim families fled their Teslic homes to escape armed groups of Serbs who had issued threats, perpetrated beatings, and attempted to blow up several Muslim homes. During its site visit in July, USCR met with Muslims who had remained in Teslic, who spoke of being forced to perform unpaid labor and of continuing harassment by their Serb neighbors. Between June and September, UNHCR evacuated about 100 minority persons from the Serb-controlled city of Banja Luka, at least 30 of whom had been evicted from their homes by Serb internally displaced persons. Although UNHCR strongly protested these evictions, there appeared to be little good will on the part of the Republika Srpska authorities to rectify these situations. Extremist Bosnian Croats reportedly evicted some 234 Muslims from their homes in Croat-held west Mostar during 1996. At the end of November, about 3,000 Muslims and 800 Serbs remained in the Croat section of the city, while only 400 Serbs and 200 Croats lived in Muslim-held east Mostar. Despite their higher number in Croat-held west Mostar, tolerance of minorities was reportedly considerably higher in Muslim east Mostar.
Physical Devastation By December 1996, the international community had invested some $800 million in repairing Bosnia’s devastated infrastructure. In June, UNHCR targeted 22 areas (19 in the Federation and 3 in the Republika Srpska) for investments in shelter and community infrastructure to create the physical conditions necessary for the return of refugees and internally displaced persons. By the end of 1996, some 23,800 homes, 88 schools, 43 hospitals, 60 water systems, and 47 power stations had been repaired under UNHCR’s target area initiative. Out of a total of about 100,000 persons who benefitted from the housing repairs during the year, UNHCR estimated that some 55,000 internally displaced persons were able to move into repaired housing in the target areas. In addition, electricity and water had been restored to most areas of Bosnia by the end of November. An additional 66,000 housing units were targeted for repair in 1997, mainly in Sarajevo, Tuzla, the Anvil area of the Republika Srpska, the Una Sana region, Mostar, the Zenica/Doboj region, and the middle Bosnia region. Despite this progress, the widespread and systematic nature of the destruction in Bosnia, coupled with delays in the disbursement of funds, meant that much of the country remained in ruins at year’s end. Considerable political difficulties with aid also remained, particularly with respect to the Republika Srpska, which boycotted key donor conferences during 1996, thereby effectively denying itself aid. The Republika Srpska received only 1.3 percent of the total reconstruction aid spent during the first 11 months of 1996. Even though the Republika Srpska sustained less destruction during the war, it lagged considerably behind the Federation in rebuilding as a result of the aid imbalance. International aid officials also reported that assistance to Bosnia, which largely has been funneled through the governing authorities, has had the perverse effect of solidifying the power of ultra-nationalists who took power in the September 14 elections. The continued ubiquitous presence of landmines in Bosnia also acted as a barrier to reconstruction and the return of refugees and internally displaced persons during 1996. Although IFOR had de-mined areas that it patrolled and where its troops were stationed, only in September 1996 did the UN appoint an expert to begin to clear the millions of mines and unexploded ordnance remaining in the rest of Bosnia.
Future Repatriation Plans In a statement to the Peace Implementation Council in London on December 4 and 5, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata, said that large-scale returns of refugees and internally displaced persons might begin in the spring of 1997. The High Commissioner’s aim is to ensure that all refugees and internally displaced persons find - or at least are in the process of finding - a durable solution by the end of 1998. Ogata said that during 1997 UNHCR would continue to focus on assisting organized returns to majority areas, relocating persons who freely opt to move to different areas of Bosnia, and initiating integration programs for those who decide to settle permanently in neighboring countries. The focus on returning refugees to majority areas should not be interpreted as giving up hope for persons wishing to return to their homes in areas where they would be in the minority, the High Commissioner said. Although Ogata announced that the need for an across-the-board temporary protection regime for Bosnians had ceased to exist, she pointed out that certain groups and individuals still have well-founded fears of persecution or acute humanitarian needs. These persons, according to Ms. Ogata, should be granted continued protection or permanent resettlement in third countries.
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