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Serbian Returnees Left to Fend for Themselves in Sandzak

11 07 2007  Former Bosniak and Roma refugees, deported from Western Europe, are being dumped in Serbia’s most isolated and remote region.

By Zoran Maksimovic in Novi Pazar

Djijan Osmanovic, a nine-year-old Roma knows barely a word of his Roma mother tongue. Nor does he know much Serbian, the language of the country his family comes from and in which he now lives.

Playing among the ruined houses with his friends in the Novi Pazar settlement of Savci, he prefers to chatter away in the German he learned while living abroad.

Born to refugee parents in Germany, Djijan’s family moved later to Denmark. But in 2004, when he was seven, his family was deported back to Novi Pazar, the largest town in Serbia’s isolated and mainly Muslim Sandzak region.

In the settlement of Savci, where his family now lives among 37 repatriated families, many prefer speaking German to Serbian or Roma.

This is certainly the case among most of the 80 or so children attending Savci’s primary school.

“I had to learn German to speak with my mates,” little Djijan says in fluent German. “Now I’m trying to learn Serbian in school but it’s a big problem because I don’t know the language and everything is different here.”

His father, Saban, says Djijan and his other children did not resume schooling immediately on their return to Serbia mainly because the children did not know the language.

In Sandzak, a region lying at the junction of three state borders, Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian, about 50,000 people have returned since 2000.

Most left this part of Serbia in the Nineties on account of the wars in the region, the Belgrade government’s discrimination against non-Serb minorities and a pervasive feeling of social insecurity.

Most have returned to Novi Pazar, followed by neighbouring Sjenica, where according to the statistics every fourth citizen is a repatriate.

The biggest number by far returned from Germany - as much as 70 per cent. The next largest numbers came from Holland, Sweden, Denmark and Luxembourg. The highest rate of return was recorded in 2003 and 2004, when an average of 900 to 1,000 people arrived back each month.

Reintegration, a local organization in Sandzak dealing with these people, says every third repatriate was deported, which means they did not return voluntarily.

Kadrija Mehmedovic, president of Reintegration, told Balkan Insight that while ignorance of the national language was the children’s biggest problem it was not the only obstacle repatriates face when trying to readjust. “On average, these Sandzak families stayed abroad for around 12 years,” Mehmedovic notes.

“As many as 80 per cent of the child repatriates aged 12 or under was born abroad, more than half speak no Serbian and more 30 per cent did not resume their education,” he adds.

Mehmedovic says that on return to Serbia, the repatriates faced both poverty and unemployment, and he especially laments the government’s failure to put in place special programmes to help child repatriates resume education.

The criticisms appear well founded. Serbia has no real repatriation strategy for the returnees and has opened no reception centres to help them. Many left their personal documents in the countries from which they returned. A lot of things have changed in Serbia in the meantime.

Safet Osmanovic says that when he retuned to Savci he found his house ruined and overgrown with bushes. He and his wife are unemployed, like the majority of repatriates.

“Only 2 per cent of repatriates have got permanent jobs and none has returned to the job they had before leaving,” Mehmedovic explains.

Hajrija Redzovic left for Germany in 1999, settling in the town of Wilhelmhaven at a centre for asylum-seekers.

In Germany, she immediately obtained refugee rights to welfare assistance and gave birth to a daughter. But on the basis of an agreement that Serbia signed with 17 host countries in western Europe last July, Redzovic was deported back to Serbia along with her daughter Emma and her husband.

“Four policemen came to my apartment at 6am and said we had an hour to pack,” she recalls. “The luggage could not exceed 36 kilograms, which is what we carried to the plane. I came back with hardly anything.”

On return to her homeland, Redzovic faced numerous problems. She had no personal documents and her daughter had no certificate of registration and was not admitted into the Serbian birth registry.

Numerous Roma and Bosniak returnees have also been re-settled in Sandzak even though they are not from the region, but from Kosovo. Sandzak is close to Kosovo and repatriation to Kosovo itself is out of the question on account of Albanian hostility.

Hamid Pepic is one of them. After his house in Kosovo was destroyed during the 1999 war, he sought asylum for several years in the Netherlands. But now he has been sent back to Serbia to live in Sandzak with his six-member family. With no ties to the area, he has no source of income, either.

Under the Geneva Convention, people from former Yugoslavia who left for countries in Western Europe were entitled to claim refugee status because their minority and basic human rights had either been violated or were clearly in danger. But after the conditions were created for those rights to be restored, Serbia was obliged to accept back those citizens, on the basis of which Belgrade signed readmission agreements with 17 Western host countries.

Georg Einwaller, of the German embassy in Serbia, says more bilateral work is needed to help returnee families in Sandzak who have spent years outside Serbia and forgotten its language and culture.

“We have to work together with our colleagues in Serbia on their reintegration and on the improvement of their position,” he said. “By solving the problem of documentation, we can also help them exercise their rights to social and health insurance and education.”

But Kadrija Mehmedovic emphasizes that besides international institutions, local authorities and the non-government sector, Serbia’s own government needs to assist the process as well.

Marija Vojinovic, assistant director of the Serbian Service for Human and Minority Rights, the only state organization indirectly dealing with the repatriates, agrees. She estimates that as many as 150,000 people may return to Serbia over this year and next year, half of whom will be Bosniaks from Sandzak.

Vojinovic claims the Service for Human and Minority Rights devised a strategy and an action plan; the problem was that it was not being implemented.

Hannelore Valier, head of the OSCE mission in Serbia’s democratisation department, says if the issue the returning refugees is not handled with greater sensitivity, there will be trouble down the line. It could be “a danger for the region’s stability”, she warns.

Zoran Maksimovic is a freelance journalist in Novi Pazar. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.