SERIES RELAUNCH: THE TENT PEOPLE OF BOSNIA

THE YEAR OF NOW OR NEVER

– International Resolve

– The Regional Dimension

– Minority Returns

– Grassroots Activism

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From the Editorial Desk:

The war in Bosnia produced incredible suffering, but also plenty of heroes. Five years after the end of the fighting, both aspects are still very much on display — as readers of this special miniseries of ‘On the Record’ will quickly appreciate.

PETER LIPPMAN, an associate of the Advocacy Project, who visited Bosnia last year to observe the efforts of Bosnian refugees to return home, wrote the issues. He resumes his coverage with this profile of southeast Bosnia.

The war uprooted roughly half the entire Bosnian population. Almost a million Bosnians fled abroad, while another 1.3 million were displaced within the country.

Bosnia’s survival as a multiethnic state depends on these refugees returning home. Since the signing of the Dayton Agreement in October 1995, over 600,000 refugees have returned from abroad and a similar number has returned home to an area where their ethnic group is in the majority.

But so-called ‘minority returns’ have been painstakingly slow. Last year, according to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), about 41,000 Bosnians returned home to an area where they were in the ethnic minority. Of these, about 70 percent went back to the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the rest to the Serb Republic.

There is some room for encouragement in these figures. The number of minority returns has been rising steadily in the last two years. Three times as many have returned so far this year as in the same time period last year.

But does this mean that Bosnia’s refugee crisis — the most severe in Europe since the World War II — is on the point of resolution? As Peter reports, it is far too soon for such optimism. There are 840,000 Bosnians still barred from their own homes. They are prevented from returning by insecurity, intimidation, and a lack of economic opportunities.

Resistance to their return is particularly fierce in the southeastern part of the Serb Republic, the Bosnian Serb entity — the heartland of Serb nationalism. This is where many suspected Serb war criminals are hiding out and where the very idea of a unified Bosnia is anathema. This is the nut that has to be cracked for Bosnia to be reborn as a single nation.

If the breakthrough does not come this year however, it may be too late. Many exiled Bosnians are close to giving up the struggle. In other words, the next few months could prove critical.

One of the deciding factors, in Peter’s view, will be the determination of the refugees themselves. In one of the most important developments of postwar Bosnia, hundreds of Bosniak refugees have taken matters into their own hands and started to camp out near their former homes in an effort to wear down the resistance of their enemies. Several of these tent encampments have sprung up around the southeastern Serb Republic.

This strategy is starting to produce results. It is forcing the international community to take notice, and small numbers of refugees are trickling home. Once again, it is too soon to tell whether the floodgates will open, but the sudden emergence of these ‘tent people’ is an encouraging sign because it shows that Bosnia’s refugees are determined to take control of their own future. This may be their best hope of regaining their homes.

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Since the suspension of his Bosnian dispatches last summer, Peter has contributed to two other series of ‘On the Record’: one on Kosovo; the other, Guatemala.

Last December, he returned to Bosnia and visited the first tent encampment near Gorazde. He is once again in Bosnia, and his next assignment will be to cover the fifth anniversary of the infamous July 11, 1995, massacre at Srebrenica.

We will also be running a three-part ‘miniseries’ on Bosnian women, written by Elissa Helms. Elissa is an associate of the Advocacy Project who is writing a doctoral thesis on the world-famous women’s group Medica, based in Zenica.

Subscribers can read will be able to read the entire series of Peter’s 1999 reports on Bosnian refugees, together with photos, on our new website, which will be posted next month.

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THE YEAR OF NOW OR NEVER

The year 1999 was proclaimed as the second ‘Year of Return’ for Bosnia’s refugees and displaced people. It turned out to be a year of mixed results.

NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia created great tension in the Serb-controlled entity of Bosnia, the Republika Srpska (RS), and this disrupted the return of refugees to the RS. But later in the year, after the crisis in Kosovo receded, the pace of returns picked up again. Cracks even began to appear in the notorious ‘black holes’ of southeast Bosnia –Foca, Gacko, and Srebrenica.

The main obstacle to return in the first two years after Dayton was violence. Low-level terrorism has certainly continued. For example, a Muslim member of the Srebrenica municipal council was stabbed last October, and returnees have also been assaulted in Bijeljina, Bratunac, Capljina, and other locations.

Generally speaking, however, physical attacks have given way to other forms of obstruction. One example is the near-universal bureaucratic stonewalling, or ‘ethnic cleansing at the office counter’ described in previous dispatches of this series. The Office of the High Representative of the international community in Bosnia has intensified legal efforts to put an end to it.

Bosnia’s poor economy creates another major disincentive to return. One analysis released at the end of last year found that about 800,000 Bosnians were unemployed, and that only 160,000 Bosnians were gainfully employed. To make matters worse, as many as half of these jobs could be lost by the upcoming privatization of large state-owned firms. Almost half of those currently registered as unemployed are unskilled workers.

The economic infrastructure is in shambles, and the national debt is close to $1.75 billion dollars. This debt is exacerbated by pervasive corruption: hundreds of millions of dollars are lost each year to smuggling and lax customs control.

To make matters worse, international donor fatigue appears to be setting in. The UNHCR is finding it increasingly difficult to raise money for Bosnia, and most other international agencies have turned their attention toward Kosovo and other hot spots. After a meeting in Brussels of the Dayton Peace Implementation Council in late May, the High Representative of the international community in Bosnia, Wolfgang Petritsch, stated, ‘the world is tired of Bosnia.’

This is not to underestimate the progress that has taken place. Over 10,000 Bosnians returned to their homes in minority areas in the first five months of this year, which is roughly three times as many as in the same time period last year. But there is no telling whether this can be sustained.

One thing is certain: 2000 is not the ‘Year of Return,’ but the year of ‘Now or Never.’ Without massive returns this year, disappointed refugees will start trying to leave Bosnia for countries abroad. (This has already started.) Families that cannot leave will resign themselves to remaining in internal exile. As it is, many of their younger members hardly remember their pre-war homes.

A common sentiment, especially among hardliners, is that Bosnians do not wish to return — that they accept the de facto ethnic partition of Bosnia that came with the war. However, a survey taken by the UNHCR in the fall of 1999 showed otherwise. Around 61 percent of those polled responded that they wished to go back to where they lived before the war.

Of course, this wish is based upon conditions that, for the most part, do not yet exist — economic and physical security, repair of homes, and availability of education. If these factors are guaranteed, over 60 percent of those in exile might well return home. If not, the number is certain to be considerably lower.

– International Resolve

Property disputes constitute one of the major obstacles to return — and present the international community with one of its greatest challenges.

To date, most of the internally displaced persons have returned to villages, and it is widely assumed that no large-scale returns can take place to the towns until socially owned apartments and private houses are repossessed. The problem is that members of the majority ethnicity often occupy such properties.

Many of these squatters are “double occupants,” which means they are living in the homes of displaced persons but were not forced to surrender their own property during the war. These are the first targets for eviction. Evictions are slowly on the increase, but significant return to cities other than Sarajevo has not begun.

All too often, property claims run into a bureaucratic roadblock. The chances are that a displaced person trying to regain his or her home will be faced by a tangle of conflicting regulations and forms, as well as hostility at the office window. Last fall, the office of the High Representative (OHR) put in place a package of property laws that seek to harmonize the regulations of the two Bosnian entities (Serb Republic and Federation) and also to streamline all government ministries and offices involved with property claims. All of this fits into the current strategy of the international community, which is to promote the “rule of law” rather than to strictly count returnees according to their ethnicity.

With this has come increasing resolve. The new property laws foresee a much stricter enforcement of the prohibition against double occupancy, with tight deadlines and fines for violators. There will be fewer avenues for stonewalling. The aim is to place the burden of enforcement more squarely on the shoulders of local officials, who will have to become more cooperative or face sanctions.

Those who refuse risk being dismissed from office. Late last year, nine Serbs, seven Muslims, and six Croats — mayors, cantonal governors, housing commission authorities and others — were banned from participating in politics.

This decisive action caused great excitement. International officials, local activists, and ordinary Bosnians alike hailed it as a good move that should have been made long ago. Of course, people generally lamented the removal of officials of their own ethnicity. But for the most part they were also willing to cooperate, in the hope that all returns in every direction would be unblocked.

– The Regional Dimension

The return of refugees to Bosnia is intimately linked to regional developments. The last year has been a time of dramatic change in the Balkans.

Within Bosnia itself, the political situation remains unstable. There has been a slow-burning crisis in the government of the Republika Srpska for well over a year, since the hard-line president Nikola Poplasen was removed by international officials.

Since that time the Serb entity has had no president, and acting Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, the “moderate” darling of the international community, has effectively held the power in the RS. However, Dodik has been weakened by a split in his so-called “Sloga” coalition, which has enjoyed a slender one-vote majority in Parliament over the two Serb nationalist parties. Nationalist political parties in the Muslim and Croat-controlled sections of Bosnia are also fragmented.

Political instability in both Bosnian entities is likely to last at least until the general elections this fall. This instability is a reflection of the tension between the nationalist/separatist agenda of most of Bosnia’s leaders, and the unifying agenda of the international community. One result has been to block the selection of new leaders. For example, the Bosnian government was without a prime minister for three months this spring.

Working in the other direction, the April municipal elections in Bosnia definitely weakened the nationalists. The HDZ and SDS (Croat and Serb nationalist parties) retained their majorities, but in absolute terms their support dropped. In the wake of these elections, both parties are trying to put on a more moderate, cooperative face. Meanwhile, the Bosniak co-president Alija Izetbegovic recently announced that he will resign from office in October, when his current term as chairman of the three-part presidency will end.

The non-nationalist SDP party (Social Democrats) made important gains in the recent elections, broadening its support beyond the town of Tuzla. The SDP advanced in the municipalities of Zenica, Gorazde, and the core of Sarajevo. While the nationalist SDA (party of Alija Izetbegovic) still won the majority of Muslim votes, the victory of the SDP in over one-third of Muslim-controlled municipalities demonstrated a widespread impatience with the status quo.

Nationalism received a major setback at the regional level last December, when the nationalist HDZ party was soundly defeated in the Croatian national elections. The HDZ had been created by the former President Franjo Tudjman, who had strongly supported the separatist bloc among Bosnian Croats. With the defeat of the HDZ, Tudjman’s death, and the advent of a new government in Croatia opposed to Tudjman’s nationalist agenda, Bosnia’s Croat separatists have lost an important source of support.

These momentous changes in Croatia should open the way for the return of Croatia’s 300,000 Serbs, of whom 80,000 currently reside in the Bosnian Serb Republic. (Most of the rest are in Yugoslavia). The new Croatian government is negotiating with the RS to speed up two-way return, and around 40,000 Croatian Serbs living in the RS have registered for return to their homes. At least 1,500 have returned to Croatia since the formation of the new government. If Croatia’s Serbs are able to return home in significant numbers, it will free up room in the RS for displaced Bosnian Muslims and Croats who were forced from their homes.

Regionally, the biggest question mark concerns Serbia. Serbia is a potent source of instability in the region, and desperately needs democratization — but no one expects that soon. There is tension between Montenegro and Serbia, and within the Albanian-inhabited areas of southern Serbia.

If either of these hotspots were to erupt into war, it would almost certainly put a halt to the return of refugees to the Serb Republic, as happened last year during the Kosovo conflict. Anything is possible as long as the present regime in Belgrade remains in power.

– Minority Returns

People from a minority tend to return in stages. First, they venture back to villages that are close to the inter-entity borderline, or to other locations that are close to where they used to live.

This type of movement gathered pace in 1999 in the municipalities of Zvornik, Doboj, Drvar, Prijedor. Over 2,000 Bosniaks (Muslims) have returned to the Prijedor municipality, with most going to the region of Kozarac. (This was extensively covered in earlier ‘On the Record’ dispatches). According to UNHCR statistics, more than 6,000 Serbs have returned to Herceg-Bosna Canton, with most going to the communities of Bosansko Grahovo, Drvar, and Glamoc.

By the end of last year, over 7,000 displaced Muslims had returned home to practically every village in Zvornik municipality. They also started to push deeper and deeper into the RS, to villages around Nevesinje and Gacko in eastern Herzegovina, and to Vlasenica and Bijeljina further north.

The highest number of minority returns to a single canton has been to Sarajevo. There, 9,000 former inhabitants returned home last year, and UNHCR now considers that Sarajevo has met the target of 20,000 returns established by the Sarajevo Declaration of early 1998. However, some have trouble believing this, because the figures provided by Sarajevo housing authorities are open to dispute. In addition, approximately 30,000 socially owned apartments in Sarajevo were taken over during the war by squatters without tenancy rights to them. Ten thousand families are still waiting to regain their apartments, and another 20,000 are awaiting decisions on their property claims.

The District of Brcko straddles both entities and was created by the international community early in March of 1999. Since that time a multi-ethnic government and police force have come into being. While several thousand minority Muslims and Croats have gone back to their homes in the outlying neighborhoods of the city, only 230 Muslim families have returned to the city core where Muslims once constituted around half of the population.

The return of Muslims to Brcko depends upon Serbs evacuating apartments that belonged to Muslims before the war. The central District is being demilitarized, and this facilitates the return of refugees. But there are still plenty of other obstacles. For weeks, local officials in Brcko repeatedly refused to process evictions, on the grounds that their typewriters were not working.

– Grassroots Activism

Ever since the end of the war, the driving force behind repatriation has come from the refugees themselves. This year, they have stepped up their efforts.

Although limited by scarce resources, refugee advocates have provided information about property claims and other legal issues to the most isolated municipalities and collective centers. Their hard work paid pidends. By the time the period of submission expired in December, 220,000 families had submitted a property claim in the Federation. By the end of 1999, 70,000 families submitted claims in the Republika Srpska. (The submission period for the RS was extended to April 2000.)

The refugee activists pursue a different strategy from the international community. While international agencies concentrate on returning displaced persons to areas of least resistance, grassroots activists speak of “key areas to return.” One of these is the area of Kopaci, in southeastern Bosnia. Out of some 70,000 Muslims expelled from the region, only several dozen had returned by the end of 1999.

Last winter, refugees put up a tent encampment on the inter-entity borderline between Gorazde and Kopaci. Ordinary displaced people become activists. Men, women, and children stayed in tents by the side of the road near the border with the Republika Srpska for nearly five months. The international community was stung into action. Officials all the way up to the prime minister of the Federation promised support.

All over Bosnia, it seems, refugees are pushing back into regions once considered off-limits. Another tent encampment has sprung up near the infamous detention camp at Trnopolje in northwest Bosnia. Even Srebrenica, the location of the notorious massacre, is the focus of a push by thousands of displaced people. The hard-line local government of Srebrenica appears to be giving ground, although the extreme poverty and isolation of the municipality are a major problem.

Security around Srebrenica is still far from guaranteed. However, the first few Muslims returned to Srebrenica this spring, and larger groups of returnees have set up tents in nearby villages. Meanwhile, around 150 returnees set up tents in villages near Zepa, a former “safe haven” that fell soon after Srebrenica.

Refugees are even returning to the municipality of Foca, which was the scene of terrible ethnic cleansing during the early stages of the war and also the site of several “rape camps.” About 200 returnees have been staying in tent encampments near Foca since early May. Several thousand more have registered for return to this area.

By the beginning of this year, there were eight encampments in southeast Bosnia. Their existence is proof of the spirit and resilience of Bosnia’s refugees and the kind of pressure they are prepared to exert.

The question is whether the momentum can be maintained, and whether the international community is ready to offer support. Rarely do the tent people receive anything more than promises. Food and fuel are scarce in the encampments. If they do manage to return, they face hostility and anger from those occupying their homes.

The international community will have to do more to build on the opening created by the refugees. It could be the best chance yet of resolving Bosnia’s dangerous refugee crisis.