Her Mandate: Help 2.5 Million Refugees Go Home
GENEVA, April 29 (Reuters) — U.N. refugee chief Sadako Ogata will next week make her first visit to a peaceful Bosnia, hoping that spring will allow her agency to kickstart its most complex repatriation program yet. Ogata, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, was a frequent visitor to the Balkans during 3½ years of fighting as her UNHCR agency led international efforts to feed and shelter the victims of war and ethnic cleansing.
The UNHCR has continued its humanitarian work since the signature of the Dayton peace accord last December. Only now, however, with the melting of the winter snows, is it ready to start the organised return or resettlement of more than two million displaced or refugee Bosnians. "I've waited until May because this is now the time that real returns are possible," Ogata told Reuterss in a weekend interview. "There have been spontaneous returns of some 50,000 people but I never really expected a lot during the winter months."
In numerical terms the Bosnian repatriation program is not the largest the UNHCR has attempted — the war in Afghanistan produced around six million refugees — but Bosnia's ethnic patchwork and the legacies of ethnic cleansing make it probably the most difficult. UNHCR officials say there are around one million internally displaced people in Bosnia and a similar number in neighboring former Yugoslav states and Western Europe.
The original UNHCR planning figure was for 900,000 to be returned or resettled this year, but Ogata said it was clear that figure would not now be reached. Those returning to "majority areas" would soon be able to start doing so but Ogata said the time was not yet ripe for "cross-ethnic returns," when refugees try to reclaim their pre-war homes in territory now controlled by another group. "The main problem really is one of psychology. How comfortable will people feel facing return?" she said.
Although officially the Dayton accord guarantees full freedom of movement, confrontations have taken place in recent weeks as groups of displaced people from the three ethnic groups have tried to visit their homes now under the control of their former enemies.
UNHCR officials said Ogata would leave Geneva on Sunday for Zagreb and first visit Eastern Slavonia, the last Serb enclave in Croatia. She will then move on to Bosnia, starting a packed five-day itinerary with a visit to Brcko, a contested strategic town on Bosnia's border with Croatia whose fate was left out of the Dayton accord and still needs to be decided.
After Brcko, Ogata will visit Tuzla, the Bosnian Muslim-controlled city which is harbouring some 200,000 displaced, many of them from the fallen eastern enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa. Ogata will then move on to Banja Luka, the Serbs' northern stronghold, where she will meet international peace coordinator Carl Bildt, Bosnian Serb prime minister Rajko Kasagic, and representatives of Serbs displaced from their homes in a Croat offensive in the last months of the war. From Banja Luka, Ogata will start a whistlestop tour of the hotspots of central Bosnia before moving on to eastern Bosnia, including the Muslim enclave of Gorazde.
Ogata will spend a full day in Sarajevo, where she will tour former Serb suburbs, meet displaced people from all communities and monitor a UNHCR project to replace the capital's broken windows. She will also meet President Alija Izetbegovic. After a visit to the Bosnian Serb political capital Pale, near Sarajevo, Ogata will end her trip on Thursday in the divided city of Mostar, symbol of the difficulties faced by the Muslim-Croat Federation enshrined in the Dayton accord as one of Bosnia's two internal political entities.
Sadako Ogata Biography
A Multinational Response to Humanitarian Crisis A lecture by Sadako Ogata.
UNHCR as Lead Agency in the Former Yugoslavia Journal of Humanitarian Assistance
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