I'm a little surprised that Posavina got a fair bit of coverage in this article, but no mention of the situation in Vareš, Bugojno, etc...
Source:
http://www.tol.org/client/article/23364 ... hwork.htmlRestoring Bosnia’s Ethnic Patchwork
Seventeen years after Dayton, are the country’s politicians finally serious about giving postwar returnees a shot at a normal life?
by Uffe Andersen 13 September 2012
DRACEVICE, Bosnia and Herzegovina | The landscape is barren and rocky. A few simple houses are spread along the narrow road that winds up a steep mountainside to Gojko Pantic’s home.
The 70-year-old Bosnian Serb was born nearby and has lived here most of his life, raising two daughters with his wife and working in a glass factory in Mostar, southern Bosnia’s main town, a couple of miles away in the valley. It was a quiet and unchanging life, until the Yugoslav wars broke out.
“Everyone drove everyone else out, everyone killed everyone else,” he says. “Serbs in this area were in the minority, so we had to leave if we wanted to stay alive.”
His story is a common one. During the 1992-1995 war, some 2.2 million people in Bosnia – half the prewar population – were displaced. About 1.2 million left the country; the rest moved to areas under the control of their own ethnic group, leaving Bosnia’s once-fabled “patchwork” in tatters.
According to United Nations refugee agency, by the end of 2010 fewer than half of Bosnia’s 2.2 million displaced people had returned to their prewar homes. Most who did found a scene similar to what greeted Pantic and his wife when they returned to Dracevice: “When we went back in 2000, our house had been destroyed. In my village, not one Serbian house was fit to live in.”
Like most returnees, Pantic received a rebuilt house. Also like most of his fellow returnees – 99 percent of them, according to Mirhunisa Zukic, who leads an umbrella group of organizations representing Bosnia’s displaced – he does not have a job, nor much prospect of getting one.
Among the country’s slow-to-heal wounds, the lot of displaced people, who were guaranteed the right of return in the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, has remained a particularly open sore. Seventeen years after the end of the war, some activists and ethnic leaders say there are finally signs that Bosnia’s squabbling politicians are coming to grips with the issue.
A number of factors are producing guarded optimism. In 2010, after years of inaction, the government adopted a revised strategy for implementing Annex VII of the Dayton accords, which deals with displaced people. Republika Srpska, the country’s autonomous Serb-led political entity, has shown signs of softening on both internal and external returnee issues, and international donors and lenders have pledged to help fund resettlement efforts.
Still, financial and political obstacles to true reintegration remain, as does an even more implacable enemy – time.
‘ETHNIC CLEANSING IN PEACETIME’
Annex VII outlined a plan to reverse the ethnic cleansing that was the Bosnian war’s defining feature, enshrining the right of return and the restoration of property for those displaced. The initial strategy for implementing it, adopted in 2002, included “ensuring conditions for sustainable return and [the] reintegration process.”
In brick and mortar terms, there has been significant progress. Of the more than 450,000 homes destroyed during the conflict, 325,000 had been rebuilt as of mid-2010, Bosnia’s minister for human rights and refugees said at the time. But the country’s approach to the problem has focused almost entirely on where the formerly displaced would live, not how. Jobs and educational opportunities are virtually nonexistent; even electricity is often scarce in returnee communities.
As a result, there has been little headway in reversing the postwar legacy of ethnic segregation. “What we’ve seen is ethnic cleansing in peacetime,” says Zukic, whose Bosnian Union for Sustainable Return encompasses 98 groups representing the displaced around the country.
She and other activists, like Kemal Gunic and Sulejman Pasic of the Association of Returnees to Banja Luka, contend that the country’s politicians, primarily concerned with maintaining their ethnic power bases, have effectively hamstrung reintegration by restricting returnees’ access to jobs, education, social welfare, and health care.
In Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska, fewer than 1 percent of returnees are employed, Gunic and Pasic told TOL in an email. “The curricula in school history [classes] are falsified,” they wrote. “The street names in Banja Luka give the impression that you have found yourself in a small town in Serbia. Health security is minimal, social security practically invisible.”
By 1996, “our union had already said that return has to be an integrated process, taking into account all parts of life – restoration of houses, jobs, health and social security, education,” Zukic says. “Only now have politicians started thinking about those things, [about] making return sustainable.”
When the revised strategy was adopted in 2010, Sulejman Tihic, head of the Party of Democratic Action, one of the main Bosniak parties, acknowledged it was “15 years late.” The 125-page plan for the first time put efforts to socially and economically integrate returnees into their communities on an equal footing with restoring their physical property. It promised electrification, health care, social protection, and the right to education and labor.
The strategy “gives prominence to humanitarian concerns and seeks to provide some choice to displaced persons,” by offering compensation for those unable to return to their former homes, Huma Haider, a British development expert, wrote in a 2010 paper for the Tufts University-based Journal of Humanitarian Assistance. “By moving away from the prior exclusive focus on housing reconstruction, it aims to address the problems and failures experienced on the ground.”
But the failure of the country’s politicians to agree in other areas – notably, on how to form a government after inconclusive elections in October 2010, a stalemate that lasted 14 months – essentially froze implementation of the strategy, and federal spending on sustainable return. It also delayed arrangements for a 400 million euro ($512.5 million) loan the prior parliament had decided to take out for the purpose.
In April, participants at a Sarajevo donor conference pledged 300 million euros for programs to aid displaced people across the former Yugoslavia. The two biggest donors, the United States and the European Union, have promised to up the ante to 500 million euros. While the money isn’t earmarked specifically for Bosnia, it could help kick-start stalled initiatives for sustainable return in the country.
A STABLE RETURN
One of the most drastic changes in ethnic composition in Bosnia happened in the Posavina region, along the Sava River basin next to the Croatian border. Most of the 220,000 ethnic Croats who resided before the war in what is now Republika Srpska lived here. Today the Croat population is about 15,000.
That so few have returned has been seen by many as a result of policies pursued by ethnically minded politicians both inside and out of Bosnia. For example, Mirhunisa Zukic says that after the war the Croatian Democratic Union – the main center-right party in Croatia – and its Bosnian Croat wing helped displaced people from Posavina “get citizenship in [Croatia] so that they could vote both here and there. Those who wanted to return to Bosnia, on the other hand, were left to fend for themselves.”
In a sign of the changing times, Milorad Dodik, the leader of Republika Srpska, and Croatian President Ivo Josipovic met in March 2011 with refugee organizations from both territories in the Croatian border town of Slavonski Brod. The two leaders publicly agreed that Croats should be welcomed back to Republika Srpska.
Davor Cordas, Republika Srpska’s minister for refugees and displaced people, says that proclamation “encouraged many who had been in doubt whether to return.”
Cordas was appointed minister in February 2011, becoming the first ethnic Croat in the post (since 2002 it had been held by a Bosniak). “The political situation in Republika Srpska has matured” with regard to ethnic issues, he contends, citing as further evidence the most recent local elections four years ago, in which Posavina's Croats got their first representatives in municipal governments.
That marks a big step, Cordas says, because “important decisions are taken at the local level, about employment, aid for farmers, health, culture, and sports ... about everything that is necessary for a family to live in dignity.”
“President Dodik has finally decided to make a positive turnaround regarding the return of Croats who’d been driven out and fled,” agrees Franjo Komarica, the Catholic bishop of Banja Luka. But he says the rhetoric has not been matched by sufficient financial, political, and legal help for returnees – save for Cordas, whom the bishop credits with trying to “squeeze out as much financial support as possible for the Croatian population.”
Cordas maintains that the political will is there but a lack of funding has hamstrung return initiatives. Applications from returnee families to have their houses rebuilt exceed the available money to pay for the work, he notes.
But even when money from donors and lenders eventually arrives, he adds, “support must be directed to projects that will contribute to a genuine return – sustainable-return projects that offer families economic security through farming, handicrafts, or small businesses.”
Otherwise, he continues, “restored houses will end up empty,” like the thousands across Bosnia that many returnees use only in the summer or on weekends. “Where someone is encouraged to start a business, the whole community wakes up, and life gets easier.”
Angela Corkovic could be the poster girl for this philosophy. When the war started she was living in the Croatian village of Micije in Posavina. In 1992 the villagers were forced to leave, and Corkovic went to live with her husband, who, like many Yugoslavs, was already working abroad, in Vienna.
Corkovic’s husband died in 2009. Two years later, she surprised her former Micije neighbors by moving back to the village, where Croatians’ houses had long since been destroyed and once-tended fields were choked with weeds.
“All the other refugees told me I was crazy,” she recalls. “ ‘What do you want to go back there for?’ ”
Corkovic upended the usual calculus of return: she did not start by having her house rebuilt. Instead, she cleared out an old garage in which a neighbor had kept sheep while she was gone. Now 63, she still lives there, installing the electricity herself. And, putting the sustainability in her return, she applied for and received a grant from Cordas’ ministry to build a 144-square-meter stable.
There she tends a herd that now numbers 50 sheep and 20 goats and is growing steadily. She sells the male animals for meat and keeps the females for breeding. She plans to make the overgrown fields tillable again and to employ the one-time neighbors she fully expects to follow in her footsteps.
“Many former neighbors come to visit from the new homes – in Croatia, or even in Austria or Switzerland – to see what I’ve achieved,” she says with evident pride. “People who see what I've created in just a year all say that they want to come back. They want to live where their forefathers lived, and to make things grow. When they see what is possible, they're encouraged to return.”
BATTLING TIME
Cordas lists other projects returnees have started with support from his ministry, such as an “ethno-village” in Pelagicevo, another Posavina municipality – a sort of open-air museum in which residents preserve and demonstrate the area’s agricultural, culinary, and other traditions.
That project has “Croats from the surrounding area asking how to return. Some are interested in developing tourism in the area,” Cordas says. “We need to invest in such projects because they carry the future in them. They don't come down to short-lived handouts.”
Such investment could not happen without a political green light, as the Banja Luka daily Nezavisne novine noted, with a mix of hopefulness and pessimism, when the Bosnian Union for Sustainable Return held a meeting there this summer to shore up support for the revised strategy. “Ten years ago there was funding for return, but no political will to let Mostar’s Serbs go back to their homes,” the newspaper said. “Today, it’s the other way around: the will to return is certainly there, but there’s no funding.”
Dodik, visiting Mostar in May, endorsed ethnic Serbs’ return to the city, now populated almost entirely by Bosniaks and Croats. “Mostar is a Serbian town, too,” he said, a reference to the city’s prewar Serb population of 30,000.
About 5,000 Serbs live in Mostar now, according to the Belgrade daily Politika, which cited the estimate of a Serbian Orthodox priest who returned in 2010 when work started on rebuilding the town’s war-damaged cathedral. Republika Srpska has contributed to the restoration, and it opened an office in Mostar to help those who fled to the Serb entity during the war to return to the city.
“It means a lot that the priest is among his people,” says Gojko Pantic, the returnee resident of nearby Dracevice. “They feel more free and secure with their religious leader among them, so that’s another encouragement to return.”
But Pantic is skeptical of Republika Srpska’s initiatives in the area. “Almost 2,000 Serbian families have applied to have their houses rebuilt, and the republic hasn’t got all that money. Nor can it give people jobs.”
More than jobs, more than money, more than politics, though, the most significant factor in determining whether Bosnia’s patchwork can be re-sewn – the one mentioned by almost everyone interviewed for this article – is time. Many active on the issue fear it is running out.
Pantic’s example is again instructive. His village was home to 100 Serb families before the war. Now about 40, mostly older Serbs live here. With job prospects minimal and living conditions hard, few of their children and grandchildren have returned with them – Pantic’s own two daughters stayed put when he and his now-deceased wife came back to Dracevice. (One lives in Belgrade, the other in a Serb-dominated town in western Bosnia.) The pattern is similar across Bosnia. With young people staying away, many fear that returnee communities will die out with this generation, leaving behind a nation of homogenous communities – precisely what the Dayton accords set out to avoid.
“For those driven from their homes, time is a very dangerous enemy, and those who led the ethnic cleansing counted on this enemy,” says Komarica, the Banja Luka bishop. “Not a few of those who wished to return have already died. Many have lived for a long time in [other] European countries and overseas, where they have given birth to and raised new generations.”
With the determination that comes with opting to live in a garage and raise sheep and goats, Angela Corkovic is having none of that. “If only people are given some kind of starting point here, many more are sure to come back,” she says. “That's what my visitors tell me.”
