Programme offers people displaced by Balkans wars the joy of coming home

The 290-million euro international programme, supported by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has assisted over 8,600 people and is set to close next year.

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The tears in the eyes of Branko Glisic when he recalls coming back to live in the village he left because of Bosnia’s war say more than words.

His home in the hamlet of Ajdinovici, in the central Bosnian municipality of Olovo, was ruined at the start of the war in 1992 but in 2018 a new one was erected in its place.

“When I saw my new house for the first time, I really felt like I was born again,” said Glisic, 71, of the 45-square metre two story dwelling.

Branko and his wife Dusanka, 69, were rehoused thanks to the Regional Housing Programme, an initiative to help the most vulnerable refugees and people displaced by 1992-1995 conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

The European Union and donors such as the U.S. and several European countries, fund the 290-million-euro programme, which aims to assist some 36,000 people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has been a partner to the programme since it began in 2012.

It works with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to help ensure that the programme reaches the neediest among the displaced and that beneficiaries can access rights and services such as health, education, social care and employment.

Prior to the conflict, the couple lived peacefully in Ajdinovici and he worked in a bed factory in the town of Vogosca, near the capital Sarajevo, but war changed everything.

When it ended with the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, the country was effectively divided into two administrative entities – the Bosniak-Croat BiH Federation and Republika Srpska (RS).

The couple and their children felt compelled to leave for the Republika Srpska after the agreement awarded their village to the BiH Federation entity.

“Our village practically emptied. So we had basically no choice but to go, too,” he said.

The next six years they lived in a ruined house in conditions Branko said were “inhumane.”

“If I had known what was waiting for me in the refuge, I would have never left my house,” he said. In 2001, they moved into a house owned by a family friend in the town of Vogosca. It was close to their home village and he would visit regularly to cultivate raspberries on his small patch of land.

In 2014, he heard about the RHP and decided immediately to apply.

“This was the only possibility for us to go back home and rebuild our lives,” he said. Their adult children, who had grown up away from the village, stayed in the RS.

Branko joined a local agricultural cooperative, supported by the US government, and sold his produce. He was with Croat and Bosniak associates in the cooperative but said there was never a problem either with them, or with his neighbours.

“Our collaboration in the cooperative is the best example of how people can live and work together, putting our terrible past behind“, he said.

By mid-March 2021, the RHP, which is managed by the Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB), had assisted over 8,600 of the most vulnerable displaced, refugee and returnee families in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia. That figure represents two-thirds of the total number of solutions (11,800) the programme aims to provide by its closure in June 2022.

“We are pleased that some 88 per cent of the RHP beneficiaries have been identified for assistance so far “, said Anne-Marie Deutschlander, UNHCR’s Principal Situation Coordinator for South-Eastern Europe.

At the same time, the RHP partner countries must ensure that remaining beneficiaries are selected quickly and receive the help they deserve to rebuild their lives in dignity through the RHP or another assistance scheme,” she said.

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