GOING HOME Eritrea VOLUME 3 • NUMBER 124 • 2001 THE BALKANS What Next? N°124 - 2001 Editor: Ray Wilkinson French editor: Mounira Skandrani Contributors: Astrid van Genderen Stort, Udo Janz, Tony Land, Andrej Mahecic, Vesna Petkovic, Aida Pobric, Maki Shinohara, Kirsten Young and EDITORIAL the UNHCR field staff throughout 2 the Balkans CS•YUG•2001 The Balkans at another crossroads. Editorial assistant: Virginia Zekrya Photo department: COVER STORY Suzy Hopper, Anne Kellner 4 Design: UNHCR/R. CHALASANI/ The Balkans are again at Many people have already gone home, but there Vincent Winter Associés a crossroads, with the are 1.3 million civilians still displaced in the Production: 4 future direction very Balkans and yet another new crisis is facing the unclear. Françoise Peyroux The former Yugoslav region. Republic of Macedonia has Administration: teetered on the edge of a By Ray Wilkinson Anne-Marie Le Galliard major civil war since the Chronology Distribution: beginning of the year. John O’Connor, Frédéric Tissot Hundreds of thousands of A history of the Balkan problem. civilians have returned home Good neighbors Map: from earlier 1990s conflicts UNHCR - Mapping Unit in the region, but an A Kosovar family repays a favor to Macedonian estimated 1.3 million are still refugees. Historical documents: uprooted. UNHCR Archives Gorazde A new face for a “living hell.” Refugees is published by the Public Information Section of the United Nations High Commissioner for CS•BIH•1996 16 CENTERFOLD MAP Refugees. The opinions expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of A roundup of Balkan events. UNHCR. The designations and maps Seeking the truth used do not imply the expression of any opinion or recognition on the part of UNHCR/M. VACCA/ Truth is never exact in the Balkans. UNHCR concerning the legal status of Along with other U.N. Minorities a territory or of its authorities. protected enclaves, Life has been particularly tough for the smallest Gorazde became a Refugees reserves the right to edit all 12 minorities. articles before publication. Articles and symbol of the war in Bosnia. photos not covered by copyright © may There have been some be reprinted without prior permission. startling changes in the last ERITREA Please credit UNHCR and the few years. 26 photographer. Glossy prints and slide One of the world’s oldest refugee communities duplicates of photographs not covered goes home. by copyright © may be made available for professional use only. By Newton Kanhema and Wendy Rappeport CS•ERI•2001 30 PEOPLE AND PLACES English and French editions printed in Italy by AMILCARE PIZZI S.p.A., QUOTE UNQUOTE Milan. UNHCR/S. BONESS/ 31 Circulation: 227,500 in English, One of the world’s French, German, Italian, Japanese, oldest and largest Spanish, Arabic, Russian and refugee communities Chinese. 26 is finally going home—from Sudan to Eritrea. ISSN 0252-791 X Cover: Pondering the future. © S. SALGADO/BIH•1994 UNHCR P.O. Box 2500 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland www.unhcr.org REFUGEES 3 THE EDITOR’S DESK Is the glass half full or half empty? t was one of those troubling paradoxes Herzegovina going back to sensitive areas where they which so characterizes the Balkans. Even as ethnic will be minorities accelerated in the last two years. Even Albanian and Macedonian leaders prepared to sign Serbia, for so long regarded as an instigator of ethnic I cleansing, for the first time welcomed back groups of ALB•1999 minority ethnic Albanians who had fled during the turmoil. © S. SALGADO/ Democratic governments have replaced authoritari- an regimes in Croatia and Yugoslavia. The extradition of Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague raised hope that other suspected war criminals may soon be apprehended. But less encouraging news is never far away. An esti- mated 1.3 million people are still waiting to go home and it may be more difficult to successfully help them than a comprehensive peace settlement in the former in the past. An estimated 230,000 ethnic Serbs, Roma Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) recently, six and other minorities who fled Kosovo in a ‘second exo- months of clashes between the two sides continued near dus’ as the Albanians returned, are increasingly frus- the capital, Skopje. trated with their life in limbo. Yugoslavia continues to The ceremony, so symbolically full of hope, was still host 390,000 refugees from earlier conflicts. so fraught with tension, the timing and venue of the Humanitarian and development dollars are in ceremony were kept secret until the last minute. increasingly short supply, though there is a continuing The situation in FYROM was the latest regional need for the reconstruction of homes and infrastructure. flashpoint, but even in countries where the guns have Corruption, ethnic hatred are widespread in some fallen silent the situation for refugees and other dis- areas. placed persons remains full of contradiction. One day in Bosnia, a 16-year-old girl can be ruthless- As many as 1.8 million people have gone back to ly gunned down, jeopardizing months or years of their countries and homes in the last few years. The patient ethnic bridge building. On another day and on a expulsion and return in 1999 of virtually the entire eth- more promising note in Kosovo, a project is launched to nic Albanian population of Kosovo was one of the rebuild 50 houses for Serb returnees. fastest reversals of fortune in refugee history. In the Balkans, the question can continue to be Encouragingly, the number of people in Bosnia- debated: Is the glass half full or half empty? 2 REFUGEES | COVER ALB•1999 © S. SALGADO/ THELONG Balkan refugees on the road. STORY | ROADHOME... 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 Turn to page 6 Ã | COVER STORY | Ã THE nearby River Danube, the ‘newest’ victims murder of a 16-year-old Muslim girl in a LONG ROADHOME... of the 1999 crisis in Kosovo. As many as Serbian area of Bosnia can undermine 1,000 corpses have now been recovered years of patient bridge building between by Ray Wilkinson from the river and surrounding lakes, far communities. Conversely, the determina- away from the battle fronts, sparking out- tion of former Serb and Muslim enemies t is very difficult to look into rage, anger, denial and simple disbelief in a tiny village overlooking the once in- the mirror and confront the devil,” among Yugoslavs. famous Bosnian town of Gorazde to live a humanitarian aid worker said in “Just what you see depends on who is together again and share “even each indi- Belgrade recently. “This is a sober- looking into that mirror and how they in- vidual piece of chocolate we receive” re- ing and perplexing time for us.” terpret the image staring back,” the aid of- news hope that the experiment can even- She was trying to put into some kind ficial said shaking her head. tually work. Iof perspective the rapidly changing and Which is true not only for Yugoslavia. often contradictory developments sweep- The Balkan region is a bewildering mo- THE GOOD NEWS ing across Yugoslavia. saic of hope and despair, of progress and At least 1.8 million civilians through- The extradition to The Hague to face renewed crisis. out the Balkan region have gone back since the wars began to wind down. The returns ranged from the spontaneous mass repa- triation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic CS•BIH•2001 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 sus- UNHCR/R. CHALASANI/ pect 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 Za- greb insisted other refugees who fled dur- ing the 1990s would be fully reintegrated by the end of 2002. Belgrade relaxed its laws, making it eas- Around 1.8 million people have gone back since the 1990s wars have ended, ier for many of its 390,000 refugees to ap- including these Muslim minority returnees to Republika Srpska in Bosnia busily ply for citizenship and stay permanently. rebuilding their homes. Encouraged by those developments, UN- HCR High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers said for the first time in a decade there was war crimes trials of Slobodan Milosevic; The world’s greatest powers and mili- now a real possibility the refugee problem the establishment of democratic govern- tary machine, NATO, may have estab- could be successfully resolved. ment; the reopening to the outside world lished peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina and The international community signaled after years of isolation; the hopes for a bet- Kosovo, but it is an uneasy and tenuous its pleasure with Belgrade’s flexibility by ter future for hundreds of thousands of kind of stalemate. Long-term success—or approving a nearly $1.3 billion aid package THE BALKAN REGION IS A BEWILDERING MOSAIC OF HOPE AND DESPAIR, OF PROGRESS AND RENEWED CRISIS WHERE GRANDIOSE GLOBAL STRATEGIES MAY ULTIMATELY DEPEND ON THOUSANDS OF TINY INDIVIDUAL GESTURES. refugees and displaced persons was the failure—ultimately could be governed by to help rescue an economy devastated by kind of good news which would have been small, personal actions multiplied many years of war and isolation. unthinkable only months earlier. times over as efforts to return and fully in- The extradition to The Hague to face But also on that day, people in the cap- tegrate millions of people uprooted by war crimes of Yugoslavia’s former leader, ital were confronted with the first grisly more than a decade of conflict continue.