The Border at Vracenovici

"It's so bad that it can't be worse. Village property has been split up and farmers can't get to their fields," says Antonije Gnjatovic, a teacher at the elementary school in Vracenovici (a border crossing on the Niksic-Bileca road).

The school borders on the border ramp, where 20 or so policemen, customs officers and international observers mount a 24-hour guard. And that's where the local community's troubles start. The 28 families in the village were forced to turn to the authorities to seek help and when that didn't help they turned to the ruling and two largest parliamentary opposition parties in Montenegro.

"The border crossing on the Niksic-Bileca road is in the wrong place," the villagers said in a petition. "The border crossing is in the middle of the village, but the actual border is over four kilometers away. That has left the villages of Koravlica, Mokri Do, two graveyards, a church etc, outside the Vracenovici local community and outside Montenegro."

The village cafe is just a hundred yards from the crossing and that's where I tried to make contact with the people who signed the petition, but they're wary of strangers. I flashed my ID and the waitress (who doesn't want her name in the papers) shouted that she "feels safer because the police are near and doesn't know who they're bothering". Banjo Komnenic from Polatovci village interrupts her angrily, saying that the crossing can't be there and that no one has anything against the police and customs, but that they do mind that someone decided to put the crossing there and caused all the problems once the international observers were in place.

"I have relatives and neighbors in Bileca," Luka Bacovic joins in, "now it's a problem for them to come here and tend their fields; they can't get firewood across and we can't get to those two Montenegrin villages."

Three policemen and a customs officer come in, look us over, sit down at a table in a corner and leave soon afterwards. Local community office head Rajka Tomasevic sits down with us, as well as Milivoje Antovic, headmaster of the local school.

Antovic agrees to accompnay us to the villages past the border crossing. The police and customs take down our names and the car registration and let us through without any problem.

Pensioner Veselin Papic and his wife greet us in Koravlica village. His house is less than a kilometer from the Bileca lake and just several hundred yards from the stream that marks the actual border.

"I'm neither here nor there," Papic says. "I'm a Sarajevo railways pensioner. From 1980 until this madness began I got my pension regularly; now I get nothing. We on this side of the stream paid our taxes in Niksic, the other on the other side in Bileca, and there are people with property on both sides."

Papic says the border is strange here. From the banks of the lake it climbs high onto a hill and then follows the stream to another hill. His ancestor Scepan Papic is to blame. He was so fierce in insisiting that his village become Montenegrin that the Austrians finally redrew the border to follow the stream. That was verified later and the village became the westernmost tip of Montenegro. Today's borders affect all the locals and the regime on the border even more. If the border does get lowered to the stream, the Paic and Perucica families would have to cross borders to get to their property again. A village road leads across Montenegrin territory to Vracenovici, but it has to be improved for cars to get through. That didn't bother smugglers, but the police blocked off that road as well.

"So we're left without a road across our territory," Papic says. "Recently, they debated whether to confiscate a sack of flour from my car at Vracenovici."

Some people have taken care of their pensions, but many haven't and there's no one to sell their farm produce to because they can't cross the ramp with it.

"I went to Niksic to see about my pension and they told me nothing could be done now," Papic says. "They sent me over to the Red Cross. I went there and told them I have cattle and property and they said they couldn't do anything for me, which is right. And they say tax lists have arrived at the office in Vracenovici. I'm not going to pay them. They're not giving me anything and they're preventing me from getting to my home."

In Mokri Do, Danilo Komar says: "This is really becoming unbearable and the state must do something to help us get back to normal. Maybe they could give us green cards, find a way for us to get to our property, shops, market."

The police at the crossing say they're forbidden to say aything to reporters. The customs officer says the same and the international observers are unwilling to talk. No one banned cameras and we took pictures of the crossing, but we were asked not to photograph the 200 liters of wine they just confiscated.

Milan Vujovic, one of the people who signed the petition, says he doesn't mind the police, that there haven't been any incidents, that they often give lifts to the locals, but adds that the whole village is expressing solidarity with the two endangered villages in the buffer zone. That wasn't organized by any party, but rather by the residents themselves.

Marko Vujovic says the problem is that, under the regulations, they could be banned from burying people in the local graveyard, which is past the ramp. The Komari trucker family from Mokri Do also has problems because they're banned from crossing the border whenver they need to.

"Danilo Kamar recently bought a hog. At the crossing he explained that he had bought the hog, asked them to count the hogs in his truck and promised to come back 15 minutes later with only one hog less. The international observers said OK, but the policeman wouldn't let him through. There are some policemen who understand our problems, but there are others who only do what they have been ordered to do."

Who issued the orders and why is not clear to our hosts. Marko Vujovic says he went to Niksic security center and was told that the border was moved because they couldn't stop cars going uphill (where the border should be). Locals say the Herzegovina ramp is there and they stop cars on a slope.