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Ethnic Hatred Jeopardizing Return of Refugees By Stephanie Nebehay
Roughly 75 Muslims informed the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Mostar on Tuesday they would not take the daily buses back to the nearby Croat-run town of Stolac to work on their houses because of harassment, according to a spokesman.
The programme is one of four pilot projects announced at peace talks in Dayton, Ohio last year to encourage ethnic minorities to return home. The others are in central Bosnia: Travnik, Jajce and Bugojno. "This morning the group arrived at the UNHCR office and said that they would no longer go to Stolac to work on their houses because the intimidation was just becoming too great," UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond told a news briefing in Geneva.
"Throughout the past months, there have been repeated instances of these people going back to their houses in the
morning to find the work that they have done the previous day has been torn down. There have been anti-Muslim slogans painted on the walls, and furniture had been overturned," he added.
One empty house in Stolac burned mysteriously on Friday and another on Monday was "an obvious case of arson."
"So these pilot projects which were aimed at building confidence within the Federation itself are now in jeopardy," Redmond said. "Even within the Federation, among so-called allies, the ethnic hatreds and barriers are enormous." "Only one of them has been successful. That was in Travnik, which has allowed a total of 300 (Croat) families to return."
Travnik, Muslim-controlled, was only to have taken back 100 families. "They have more than met the goal," Redmond said.
In Bugojno, a Muslim-controlled town which was to have allowed 200 Croat families, there have been no returns. "Bugojno has a hardline Muslim mayor and he is totally uncooperative. He hasn't even allowed the process to start," Redmond told Reuterss.
The UNHCR spokesman described the programme in Jajce, which has allowed 120 of 200 Muslim families back, as "stalled." Soren Jessen-Petersen, UNHCR's special envoy for former Yugoslavia, was in Mostar trying to sort out the Stolac problem. "After he got word that these groups were refusing to go back, he was going to try to talk to Croat officials to try to get this situation resolved," the spokesman said.
The hillside town had a pre-war population of 18,681, nearly half of whom were Muslim, according to UNHCR. After two wars, the population has been "ethnically cleansed" and is now down to 8,250 -- with a total of 20 Serbs and Muslims. Christiane Berthiaume, a UNHCR spokeswoman who was in Stolac last Friday, told Reuterss: "The climate is very tense between Croats and the Muslims who come back to work o their homes. Some Muslims say they are not sure they will return to live there." |
GENEVA, July 9 (Reuters) - The United Nations said on Tuesday that pilot programmes for Croats and Muslims to repair their homes and eventually return to their native villages in Bosnia were in jeopardy due to intimidation on both sides.
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