Serbia sees some success in integrating refugees

When Nato delegates visited Belgrade for a June 13 conference, the government made them feel welcome in the unremarkable setting of a five-star hotel. Only those who ventured over the river, however, would have seen the more memorable side of the Serbian capital.

The defence ministry, downsized since the days of the former Yugoslavia, now occupies only one end of a sprawling downtown structure built in 1965. The rest is charred and twisted, a monument – albeit probably unintended – to Nato missile attacks in 1999.

Other army and police buildings remain just as devastated, frozen in time despite their prime property value in the fast-growing city of about 2m people. Dragan Sutanovac, defence minister, should have taken the delegates on a tour, showing them the alliance’s handiwork, anti-Nato protesters said.

Since the volatile 1990s, the largest former Yugoslav republic has become a peaceful, less exceptional place, with ambitions to join the EU at the earliest date possible.

Boris Tadic, the country’s strongly pro-EU president, says his background as a psychologist helps him understand “the conflicting feelings of this society” about joining the bloc. Leading EU members encouraged the dissolution of Yugoslavia, including Montenegro’s split from Serbia by a peaceful referendum in 2006.

Brussels also tacitly backed the declaration of independence by Kosovo Albanians in 2008, leaving an unresolved dispute that will still complicate Serbia’s future accession. “But there is no alternative to EU membership for Serbia and the whole region,” Mr Tadic says.

Apart from physical damage, the decade of wars and economic sanctions caused severe population upheaval. Hundreds of thousands of Serb refugees flowed in from Bosnia and Croatia, especially after the military tide turned against Belgrade in 1995. Tens of thousands of displaced Kosovo Serbs followed a few years later.

Serbia on its own numbers less than 8m people, excluding roughly 2m ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The present population is homogenous by Balkan standards, with about 90 per cent identifying themselves as Orthodox Christian ethnic Serbs.

Still, many feel uprooted from neighbouring countries. Some fled from pro-Nazi Croatian forces in the second world war, and more trickled over from Bosnia between 1945 and 1991, despite the security and surface ethnic harmony provided by communist Yugoslavia, Serbian historians say.

Sanda Raskovic-Ivic, a psychotherapist and former Serbian refugee commissioner, has described the nation as “deeply traumatised”. Herself a refugee from Croatia with a Serb father and Croat mother, Ms Raskovic-Ivic joined a democratic, but nationalist-leaning, political party and served as co-ordinator for Serb enclaves in Kosovo.

“I feel close to the problems faced by refugees, and this is the only office I could imagine myself holding after I left medicine,” she said in 2001.

The substantial “refugee” element, using the term broadly to include displaced Kosovo Serbs and Roma, has fuelled the extreme nationalist streak in Serbian politics, which in turn makes the EU nervous about integration with the country.

Last month’s capture of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime general, fulfilled an important EU demand, yet underlined, once again, which side had shelled Sarajevo and committed genocide at Srebrenica. For Serbia, meanwhile, one of the most painful images of the break-up is still of refugee farm families huddled on top of tractors, sputtering in from Croatia.

A decade ago, Serbia had about 700,000 people registered either as refugees or internally displaced. The largest number came from Croatia, followed by Bosnia and Kosovo. But the extent of the inflow has never been entirely clear.

Roughly half a million people from Bosnia and Croatia now reside in Vojvodina, Serbia’s northern autonomous province, alone, says Nenad Čanak, a liberal provincial politician. Tens of thousands of Serbian Croats and others moved out in the other direction during the early 1990s.

About 3,500 refugees and internally displaced persons continue to live in Serbia’s collective centres – container camps for those who have found no better means of subsistence, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. This is down from 25,000 in 2001.

Far larger numbers have integrated smoothly, taking Serbian citizenship, selling off their former properties and starting new lives. Branko Radujko, general manager of Telekom Srbija, the state-run phone company, came from Croatia. So did the main meat supplier to McDonald’s restaurants in Serbia.

Many more fall into the middle class, with living standards above the average for Serbian-born citizens. In some of Belgrade’s suburbs, large single-family houses stand in contrast to badly paved roads and open gutters, as infrastructure and zoning have lagged far behind the pressing needs of refugees.

Such neighbourhoods are a worry for the pro-EU government, as they have tended to voice their grievances through hard-line nationalism at the polls.

Regional tensions still add to Belgrade’s regular eastern European urban development problems. Roma, or gypsy, shantytowns have grown following steady migration from Kosovo. The mayor’s refusal to provide housing for Roma who are not registered locally has attracted criticism from human rights groups.

The state, meanwhile, has never managed to dispose of its bomb-damaged downtown buildings. The defence ministry is hard to sell off because of its architectural merits, which belatedly earned it protected status in 2005. Plaza, an Israeli developer, bought one of the interior ministry buildings four years ago for reconstruction as a hotel, but the project, like much else in Serbia, remains stalled because of bureaucratic obstacles.

Source: Commissariat for Refugees (Serbia) and UNHCR

Source: Commissariat for Refugees, Republic of Serbia