U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees
Sadako Ogata Visiting Vukovar Today
VUKOVAR, Croatia, May 5 (Reuters) — The chief of the U.N. aid agency toured Croatia's war-shattered eastern city of Vukovar on Sunday before launching an operation to return thousands of refugees. "We do have the responsibility of returning refugees and also assuring that people who are here feel comfortable that they can stay on." U.N. High Commissioner for refugees Sadako Ogata said in Vukovar.
Vukovar, battered into submission by sustained artillery and tank fire of the Serbian-led Yugoslav National Army in 1991, became a symbol of Belgrade's bloody efforts to carve a "Greater Serbia" out of Croatia and later Bosnia.
Ogata arrived in Eastern Slavonia, the last Serb-held enclave in Croatia, from Zagreb at the start of a six-day mission to Croatia and Bosnia where her agency, the UNHCR, is starting its most complex repatriation program yet. "These are enormously important confidence-building measures we have to take," Ogata told reporters after meeting Jacques Klein, the American diplomat heading the U.N. transitional authority (UNTAES).
"Administrator Klein is extremely determined to make this hopeful project come true and that people who want to come back can come back, who want to stay will stay and it requires enormous reconstruction efforts," she said. UNTAES took charge of Eastern Slavonia, a fertile plain studded with oil wells, early this year to avert a Croatian army attack that could have wrecked the new peace in Bosnia.
After demilitarization, Croats driven out of the region by Serb militants in 1991 are to be resettled in former homes and Croatian government institutions to be gradually restored. UNTAES' mandate lasts one year with an option to extend to two years if difficulties arise.
Croats want to regain total control within a year while the local Serbs, reluctantly reconciled to Croatian authority after Serbia withdrew support for their revolt, hope to drag out the process as long as possible. Mutual mistrust runs deep. Roughly 150,000 Serbs inhabit the enclave now, a third or more of them refugees from former rebel zones in Croatia and reconquered by the Croatian army in mid-1995.
Ogata met only with refugee chief Ankica Mikic on the Serb side but not with senior Serb officials because, as informed Serb sources said: "Tomorrow is a big saints day — Djurdjevdan — and everyone is already celebrating."
U.N. officials said the fact that the Serb leadership did not meet Ogata had no political implications. "It is just bad timing," a U.N. official said. The UNHCR is keen not only to to see some 60,000 displaced Croats return to the enclave and local Serbs to stay, but also that Serbs displaced from other parts of Croatia be given the right to go home. "You have to deal with the return of the Croats to Eastern Slavonia as well as with the possibility of Serbs going home (to other areas)," she said. "Basic principles have to apply — that people can return where they came from."
From Eastern Slavonia Ogata will start an intensive tour of Bosnia, starting with the strategic town of Brcko which Serbs see as vital for maintaining an east-west corridor to Serbia itself. Bosnian Muslims regard it as a potential northern gateway to Europe.
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