06.08.2005.

Ten years on, Croatian Serb refugees have no hope of return (AFP / by Filip Rodic)

Ten years after the key military operation which ended the 1991-95 Serbo-Croat war, some 500 Serb refugees from Croatia have only a crumbling and dilapidated barracks for shelter. And no hopes of returning home.
The barracks, originally used as temporary accomodation for construction workers near Belgrade, have also been home to Serb refugees from Bosnia and Kosovo, the other flashpoint zones which blew up following the bloody break-up of the old Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
“We live in abominable conditions. Ten years of uncertainity. Ten years in a tiny room with shared toilets. I can’t remember when was the last time I had meat for a meal,” one of the inhabitants of the refugee center, 60-year old Zivko Manojlovic, said in a low voice. Manojlovic fled his village of Drnis in south-eastern Croatia with his family, including an eight-day-old baby, in August 1995, following a Croatian military operation that ended rebel Serb occupation of the area.
In Operation Storm the Croatian army regained control over a major part of its territory which had been held by Belgrade-backed breakaway Serbs, retaking the central Knin region. It triggered the flight of some 200,000 Serbs into today’s Serbia-Montenegro and Bosnia, while hundreds of civilians were killed, according to the UN war crimes court. Croatia marks on Friday the tenth anniversary of the fall of Knin, the stronghold of Serb rebels, to the Croatian army on the second day of Operation Storm. Manojlovic looks back on his days in Croatia with fondness, but holds out no hope of return.
“I had a nice house and land in Croatia. But the house is destroyed and no one can think of returning there. But here, no one thinks of us, I haven’t received a single (Serbian) dinar from the government since I arrived,” he complained. Although the houses and flats the Serbs living in Croatia fled ten years ago are probably more comfortable than the refugee center they now live in, most of the refugees think a return to their villages is impossible.
“To return, why? To have some frustrated Croat killing my son? No, I don’t think so,” said Milan Pjevalica, a former biology professor from Knin.
Besides the fear of reprisal attacks by extremists and the slow pace of reconstruction of their destroyed or damaged property, many refugeesóespecially those who fought during the 1991-1995 waróalso worry that they might be arrested and charged with war crimes. “Unlike most people, I refused to leave Knin before the Croatian forces came in, because I hadn’t done anything. But I was arrested and held in a camp for 45 days before being transferred to Serbia,” Pjevalica said.
“Blasts confirming the destruction of Serb houses could be heard during these days. During the trip (to Serbia), houses in flames could be seen everywhere,” he remembered, sitting among sunflowers he has planted in front of his room in the centre. He is the only inhabitant of the refugee center who has tried to improve his surroundings.
The other barracks look the same, giving the impression that the people who live here arrived the day before and will leave the next morning. However, the refugees expect to stay there some time yet, and the centre’s manager, Milorad Bobar, has promised it will remain open until at least 2007.
As Croatia marks the tenth anniversary of the fall of Knin on Friday, the Belgrade authorities have a different view of history. During a visit to the center, Rasim Ljajic, Serbia-Montenegro’s minister for Minorities and Human rights, said operation Storm was in fact an “ethnic cleansing” exercise.
“When more than 200,000 people flee their homes in only couple of days, it is an ethnic cleansing, no matter how it was done,” he said.
Serbia’s commissioner for refugees Dragisa Dabetic said that some 540,000 Serb refugees had fled their homes in Bosnia and Croatia between 1991 and 1995. Only 120,000 of them have returned, among them 58,000 to Croatia.
Ljajic said that in the first half of 2005 less then 1,900 refugees had returned to Croatia. The low number was due to reports of arrests of returnees whose names were on secret lists of those indicted for war crimes, as well as numerous incidents committed against other refugees.