The Third Re-Run

Two days after the fall of Knin, the German and American embassies in Belgrade felt the wrath of a few hundred demonstrators who protested in Knez Milos Street against the "betrayal of Krajina", its perpetrators and all those who in any way contributed to it. However, not many people know that the crowd of angry protesters applauded while marching next to the white building of the Canadian Embassy in 75 Knez Milos Street.

On the following day the first wave of exiles from Krajina hit Belgrade, and the Canadian Embassy in Yugoslavia broke its own record: its immigration service received 1,100 applications in one day. Since the beginning of the war in Bosnia, around a hundred or so people turned up at the embassy each day with similar applications. In the old days, when the SFR Yugoslavia was still in existence, only two to three thousand people at the most wished to emigrate to Canada each year. Today refugees from all parts of former Yugoslavia will tell you that emigration to Canada is the only good thing Yugoslav civil wars ever brought to anybody. If anyone from former Yugoslavia feels some kind of a perverse gratitude towards Radovan Karadzic or Alija Izetbegovic, you can be certain that it is someone with a Canadian address.

Soon the man who is directly responsible for 25,000 wretches from Yugoslavia, finding a safe shelter in a country which offers its citizens more than any other country, will leave Belgrade. Brian Casey, who successfully ran the Canadian Embassy's Immigration Service for five years is going back home after his (extended) consular mandate in Belgrade expired. His new job will be to coordinate all Canadian immigration services in the USA from the Canadian Government Headquarters in Ottawa.

Casey: Applications from Sarajevo started to arrive in March and April of 1992. Wiser people from Sarajevo started applying even earlier, since the end of 1991. They were mainly people who met the conditions for the so-called "independents", that is people with no family in Canada who are able to finance their emigration. As the Yugoslav crisis worsened, we started receiving applications from people who failed to meet these conditions. However, political will to help the afflicted strengthened. In September 1992, our government introduced a "program of special measures" which lowered the standards for Yugoslav applicants. The program allowed us to increase the quota of immigrants, so 4,000 people left Yugoslavia in 1992.

"Vreme": Then you introduced a separate program for refugees?

Casey: That program began when the Jewish community in Sarajevo organized the departure of several hundred Jews and their families from the city. This operation was not financed by the Canadian Government but the Jewish community in Canada. The first refugees financed by the Canadian government were prisoners from Serbian camps (Manjaca, Omarska, Bileca). Around 600 of them left for Canada in 1992. It was only in 1993 that a large number of refugees started leaving for Canada as part of this refugee program.

"Vreme": What sort of figures are we talking about?

Casey: Since the beginning of the war, around 25,000 people emigrated from Yugoslavia to Canada: 4,000 in 1992; 6,000 in 1993; last year we issued 7,000 emigration visas, and further 7,000 will leave by the end of this year. Of those 25,000 the Canadian government financed 6,000 as part of the refugee program.

"Vreme": Most applications are probably very similar. Refugees already know that you have particular understanding for those who are disgusted at nationalism and who refuse to fight their neighbours?

Casey: This is true, but I noticed that in most cases people are telling the truth, even when they do not benefit from it.

"Vreme": It is being said that a mixed marriage is considered an advantage?

Casey: It is true that we consider mixed couples to be under greater threat than others, and that emigration is often the best solution for them. Similarly people from ethic minorities have an advantage over others.

Brian Casey does not want to reveal the ethnic structure of Yugoslav emigrants to Canada. He says that the average emigrant is a thirty-five-year-old with a family and a small child (which is another advantage).

With a sense of personal loss because of the catastrophe that hit Yugoslavia, Brian Casey is going back home knowing that he did all he could for the citizens of a country he got to love, and that he helped many of them to make a new start. Pictures of refugees from Krajina throw him in despair. "It is like watching a third re-run of a terrifying film". Needless to say, those who arrived in the most recent wave of refugees do not exactly match the prototype of an ideal emigrant to Canada.