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11 Croatian Refugee Families Return to Homes in Travnik
A spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) said the organisation was trying to ascertain whether the evictions on Monday night were ordered by local authorities or perpetrated by rogue elements tolerated by officialdom.
Police of Bosnia's Muslim-led central government forced 11 families totalling 25 people out of the municipality of Travnik a few months after they had returned from wartime exile.
"A day later they all returned to their homes, according to a report we have received ... We're trying to check it out and talk to the Travnik mayor to find out who actually sanctioned these expulsions," said UNHCR spokesman Kris Janowski.
Croatian state media said earlier that some of the families had regained their homes after intervention by NATO peacekeepers determined that each had valid residence papers/ All the Croats were from hamlets in the municipality of Travnik, a picturesque market town on a river bend.
Croatian reports also said Bosnian police had ordered Slavko Petrusic, a Roman Catholic parish priest in one of the villages, to leave the region immediately. "The priest refused to leave and called the Catholic cardinal in Sarajevo. The cardinal spoke to the police by phone and the police apparently changed their mind," said Janowski.
He told reporters in Sarajevo that the eviction issue was especially sensitive in Travnik because it was one of several towns designated by the Dayton peace treaty for pilot projects to repatriate war refugees.
The Dayton accord provided for the restoration of a multi-ethnic society in Bosnia. But regional nationalist bosses have clung to a three-way partition wrought by the 43-month war and tolerated intimidation of minorities in their zones.
Bosnia's original mostly Muslim government dominates in central and northwest areas while Croats -- nominally allied with Muslims in a federation -- have a separatist entity in the west. Serbs control the north and east. Local ethnic power brokers have also defied Dayton's terms by preventing the repatriation of all but a few of the more than two million refugees from the war.
Mariofil Ljubic, Croat president of Bosnia's largely toothless federal assembly, said civilian security would be urgently addressed at its next session starting on Wednesday. |
SARAJEVO, June 12 (Reuters) - Eleven Croat families evicted from a town in Muslim-dominated central Bosnia have apparently returned to their homes, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
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