A Tale of Two Cities: The Struggle to Return Continues in Bosnia

By Peter Lippman


	Stolac lies nestled among the sparsely vegetated mountains of southern Bosnia (Photo P. Lippman).

MOST PEOPLE who remember the Bosnian war of 1992-1995 know that extreme nationalist Bosnian Serb forces, backed by Serbia’s then-President Slobodan Milosevic, attacked areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina and began to expel non-Serbs from more than half of the country. Fewer know that in the second year of the war nationalist Bosnian Croats, backed by the expansionist regime of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, also launched an attack against Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) in parts of the country, aiming to carve out a separatist Croat territory.

By the time the Dayton agreement of December 1995 brought the war to an end, over two million Bosnians, or half the population, had been displaced. For the past 11 years, thousands of ordinary people have tried to return to their pre-war homes and get back to work. Meanwhile, the former warlords and authors of ethnic cleansing, many of them still in power, counter the return effort with obstruction, harassment, and apartheid.

Most refugee return has taken place in villages where people have been able to support themselves, albeit meagerly, with subsistence farming. Due to various forms of obstruction, return to the cities has been much more difficult. Two mid-sized cities, however, have enjoyed relatively solid return—Stolac in Croat-controlled western Herzegovina and Kozarac in Serb-controlled northwestern Bosnia.

Stolac is one of Herzegovina’s oldest settlements, and boasted an astonishingly rich collection of historical monuments from Ottoman times and earlier. The pre-war population of some 19,000 was just less than half Bosniak, one-third Croat, and a fifth Serb. During the war Stolac was taken over by Croats and all its non-Croat citizens expelled.

Kozarac has a long history as well. A secondary town in the municipality of Prijedor, its population numbered around 27,000 before the war, with over 95 percent of its residents Bosniak. Early in the war, separatist Serbs took over the town, expelled or killed all its Muslim residents, and destroyed over 5,000 houses.

Kozarac: Exile and Return

The Prijedor region became notorious during the war as the location of the infamous Serb-run concentration camps at Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje. Many people from Kozarac were interned at these camps, and over 3,000 of them were killed by war’s end. The rest were exiled to parts of Bosnia under Bosniak control, or to nearby Croatia and other surrounding countries.

During the war some activist women formed such groups as “Women of Bosnia” and “Through Heart to Peace” (Srcem do Mira) to help and encourage their fellow refugees in collective centers, especially in Zagreb. Soon after the war ended in late 1995, members of Srcem do Mira led a convoy of displaced Kozarac residents to visit their pre-war homes. They traveled the short distance from their temporary residence of Sanski Most, in the Croat-Bosniak-run Federation, into the Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled entity. But when they arrived at Prijedor, around 20 minutes shy of Kozarac, they were repelled by hostile Serbs throwing stones. Turning back, they regrouped in Sanski Most and prepared for a long campaign of return.

By the spring of 1998, when this writer first visited Kozarac, it was still a town full of wrecked houses. The few houses that had been left intact were either owned or had been taken over by local Serbs. Around 150 displaced Serbs from Croatia and central Bosnia inhabited the elementary school, and nationalist graffiti defaced the walls of the few buildings left standing.

Unlike in many other towns where Bosniak residents had suffered a similar fate, however, Kozarac’s would-be returnees had several advantages. One, ironically, was that most of their houses had been destroyed. This made it impossible for displaced Serbs (or profiteers) to take over their property and move in, in which case the new residents would have been much more difficult to dislodge. Here international relief agencies were ready and willing to help repair the wrecked houses, and work began in 1998.

Another advantage was the location of a large number of returnees in nearby Sanski Most, enabling them to come and go easily, clean the rubble from their wrecked houses, negotiate with relief agencies, and participate in reconstruction. Finally, the displaced residents had well-organized, dynamic, even charismatic leaders to encourage the return process.

Serious return was underway in 1999; although they lived in impoverished conditions between piles of rubble, and sent their children to Sanski Most to go to school, the residents were home. One returnee told me, “We rebuilt Kozarac ourselves after World War II, and we will do it again.”

Over the next few years, several thousand Bosniaks returned to Kozarac, making it one of a few main sites of Muslim return in the Serb-controlled entity. One of the first mosques to be rebuilt in the Republika Srpska (of many hundreds destroyed) was located in Kozarac. Despite continued obstruction from the Serb-dominated government, return has continued into the present decade.

Stolac: A “Soft” Ethnic Cleansing

Although war between the dominant Croat and Bosniak communities did not begin until spring of 1993, a year after Serb forces had unsuccessfully attacked Stolac, Croat extremists gradually expelled the Bosniak population of Stolac between spring and mid-summer of that year. Many men were rounded up and taken to Croat-run concentration camps at Gabela, Dretelj, Heliodrom and other places, where hundreds were killed. Meanwhile, Bosniak women, children and males of non-combatant age were intimidated and terrorized into leaving Stolac.

The war between the Croats and Bosniaks lasted a year, until the U.S.-brokered peace resulted in the creation of the Croat-Bosniak Federation. During the fighting Croat extremists had formed a para-state called the Croat Republic of Herceg-Bosna, which they intended eventually to annex to Tudjman’s Croatia, and in which they had no desire to include Muslims. Hundreds of Bosniak-owned homes in Stolac, including centuries-old monuments to Ottoman culture, were destroyed during the war. The Carsija mosque, Bosnia’s second oldest, was destroyed, along with all other mosques.

After the war, reconstruction of Bosniak-owned houses ran into trouble when Croat extremists, sending an anti-return message to displaced Stolac Muslims, torched or mined over 200 newly rebuilt houses. A campaign of low-level terrorism, including violent attacks on returnees, lasted for several years. But the international community was paying attention, and Stolac’s highly-educated Bosniak community, many of whose members were displaced to Mostar, was resolute.

In late 1999 Wolfgang Petritsch, the international community’s second post-war High Representative, removed from office Stolac’s Mayor Pero Pazin for “persistent and serious obstruction...in the areas of joint municipal administration, minority return, property implementation, and failure to implement decisions of the High Representative.”

Around the same time, the Office of the High Representative (OHR) began to draft and forcefully implement laws that returned usurped property to its pre-war owners. Squatters, usually from the newly dominant ethnicity, began to be evicted throughout much of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

These developments encouraged return to Stolac. While it has been an uphill struggle, to date around 4,500, or more than half of the expelled population, have returned. The Bosniak sections of Stolac today resemble the Kozarac of a few years ago, with newly restored buildings beginning to outnumber piles of rubble. The Carsija mosque in the center of town has been rebuilt, and others have been or are being repaired. In a remarkable turnaround from the immediate post-war situation, Stolac’s ancient Bosniak community has returned home, determined to continue the thread of its illustrious history.

Obstruction and Apartheid

Postwar leaders in both Kozarac and Stolac, however, have resorted to another tactic to prevent reconciliation and the defeat of separatism: apartheid. The dominant Serb or Croat ethnicity gives privileges to its constituency, while keeping the returnees in a disadvantaged position.

With unemployment in post-war Bosnia running between 40 and 80 percent, local leaders retain the power to discriminate in employment; in Kozarac municipal jobs are overwhelmingly given to Serbs, and in Stolac, to Croats.

Economic discrimination in Kozarac manifests itself in other ways as well. Muslims who have returned and wish to start a business are required to pay taxes that don’t apply to Serbs. If a returnee succeeds in opening a business, there is an “unwritten rule” that a Serb must be hired, or the owner will be harassed with gratuitous inspections and fines. Muslim returnees in nearby villages have difficulty establishing telephone and electrical service unless Serbs live in the vicinity.

Bosniaks, who now outnumber Serbs in Kozarac and the surrounding villages, have requested the formation of a new municipality separate from Prijedor. Since Bosniaks are outnumbered in the overall municipality, however, the suggestion was voted down by the municipal council.

Bosniak returnees are disadvantaged economically in Stolac as well. There public property, including parks and monuments, has been privatized illegally and bequeathed to Croats within the separatist infrastructure. The municipal pool, constructed in Austro-Hungarian times, was given to a Croat to create a coffee house. Factories, operating at reduced capacity or not at all, have been privatized and bought cheaply by Croat nationalists. “All managers, deputies and board members of companies, as almost all the employees, are of Croat nationality,” notes the Youth Forum of Stolac.

Schools are another tool of blatant discrimination. In the Kozarac elementary school, where almost all students are Bosniaks, half of the teachers are displaced Serbs. Returnees had to struggle for many years to regain their school, while displaced Serb residents of the school/collective center fiercely resisted their own removal. Finally, in 2003 the elementary school was evacuated and returned to the students. At the Stolac high school, Croat and Bosniak curricula are separate, and Bosniak and Croat students study in different shifts. Croats enter the school through the front door, and Bosniaks through the rear.

Nationalist symbols also are used to send a powerful message of domination. Croat authorities placed a statue of a Croat anti-Ottoman rebel in front of Stolac’s high school, and have changed many street names, which now bear the names of Croat nobles, nationalists, and World War II heroes.

One of the most provocative Croat symbols in Stolac has been the flag of the wartime separatist para-state, Herceg-Bosna. The Croatian flag, its red and white checkerboard slightly modified for Herceg-Bosna, has been placed prominently at the municipal building, in the town center, at the medieval necropolis of Radimlje on the outskirts of Stolac, and several other locations. Removal of this flag and its replacement with the flag of Bosnia and Herzegovinia became a goal for the Youth Forum of Stolac.

Even after all this time, anti-returnee violence still takes place on occasion. At the end of October 2006, construction material and tools were destroyed at the repair site of one of Stolac’s mosques—and the record of other, periodic incidents of violence is extensive. In Kozarac the situation is similar, with occasional attacks on mosques, and a bombing of a mini-shopping mall two years ago. But, having lived through hell during the war and then having fought to return, the returnees are determined and persistent in struggling for their rights. Having arrived at their ancestral homes, they are not about to be intimidated again.

Peter Lippman is an independent human rights activist based in Seattle.