Refugee Chief Tours Bosnia by Car,
Civilians Dream of Such Travel
SARAJEVO, May 10 (Reuters) — It was a challenge that would have been daunting only a few months ago: to drive around all Bosnia's major cities and most of its former battlegrounds in less than a week. Yet the only thing U.N. refugee chief Sadako Ogata was able to prove by cruising over old frontlines on a six-day mission this week was that, while top U.N. officials can go as they please in post-war Bosnia, for ordinary Bosnians freedom of movement remains a largely theoretical concept.Ogata, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, might not agree. In Sarajevo on Thursday she said her trip "attests to the very big changes" that have taken place in Bosnia since the Dayton peace accord was signed in December. But she conceded that freedom of movement, a key plank of the Dayton pact, faced "very serious problems," delaying the return, repatriation or resettlement of more than two million Bosnians forced out of their homes by 3 1/2 years of war.
Apart from one overland trip at the very start of the fighting in 1992, Ogata's half-dozen journeys to the city have been quick flying visits with flak jacket and military escort.This time she visited towns all over Bosnia, starting with the strategic northern port of Brcko and on to Tuzla, Banja Luka, Zenica and Sarajevo with frequent stops along the way. Her trip was to end on Friday with a visit to Pale, the Bosnian Serb political capital near Sarajevo, and then on to the divided southern city of Mostar.
On the way, Ogata met some of the 70,000 people who have now resettled somewhere in Bosnia, not all in their own homes.
In the village of Pozarike near the northern city of Doboj, for example, Muslim Jusuf Osmanovic, his wife, and seven other family members displaced by the war are living in two rooms only a few hundred metres (yards) from the old front line as they wait for materials to rebuild their houses. She also met some of the hundreds of thousands who will probably never see their homes again.
In Zenica, on the banks of the river Bosnia, Ogata visited a collective centre housing around 200 displaced from the eastern enclave of Zepa. Among those packed inside six to a room was Medija Ceremovic, who says she is 102 years old and has lived through more wars in the Balkans than she cares to remember. In Zepa last July, as Serbs set fire to her house, they laughed and said: "Don't worry, you're too old for us to bother killing."
One clear message from Ogata's mission was that if returns across the so-called Inter-Entity Boundary Line, or IEBL, were next to impossible, Muslim returns to Croat areas of the Muslim-Croat federation were not much easier. Ogata made a quick visit to the town of Jajce, ethnically mixed before the war, held by the Serbs since 1992 and then re-captured by Bosnian Croats in a final offensive.
While policemen prevented visiting TV crews from filming in the town, Ogata chided local officials for their failure to implement a pilot return project also agreed at Dayton. The project, meant to bolster the Federation, provided for parallel exchange returns of Muslims and Croats. There were about 17,000 Muslims in Jajce before the war, but of a modest Dayton target for 200 Muslim families to return to the town, only 117 have managed to do so.
On the way to Gorazde, the only eastern enclave that remained in Muslim hands, Ogata visited a camp full of displaced Serbs, many of whom fled suburbs of Sarajevo before they were handed to the Federation in March as part of the peace package. The reception, from Bosnia's most recently displaced and angriest people, was hostile and there was little talk of reconciliation. "Even if I got my own home back, I'd sell it, I'd go away for good" said Boro Mrdic, a 57-year-old from Sarajevo. "There is no way we could ever live together again."
Adopting a step-by-step approach to her agency's most complicated repatriation effort yet, Ogata announced that the three former factions had accepted rules to prevent cross- border visits degenerating into violence ½ although the confrontations continued.
She also announced the first commercial bus services over the internal border. The first, between two Sarajevo suburbs on differents sides of the line, was to have started on Thursday during her visit but never got off the ground. "Every day people are going back in small numbers, but by and large we are blocked," said Soren Jessen Petersen, UNHCR special envoy to Bosnia, who accompanied Ogata. "There is no freedom of movement for the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that is the major obstacle we face."
May 9 · Bosnian, Scalped by Drunken Serbs, Shows Scars to Ogata
May 5 · U.N. Aid Chief Prepares for Refugee Return
Apr 29 · UN Refugee Chief on Repatriation Mission
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Sadako Ogata Biography
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