An Army of Homeless People

The warm springtime sun forced him out of the barracks. It's time to work. His place of work is right next to his "apartment" that he shares with rats and cockroaches. He sells cabbage, salad and some flowers. He knows everything about the stuff he sells, as if he had always been a merchant. He even knows how deep into the ground the seeds should be planted.

The unusual seed seller we came across in one of Belgrade's many improvised markets is a colonel of the former Yugoslav National Army (JNA), a Bosnian Croat with a Serb wife and two children. When he refused to join any of the newly formed armies in the conflict that broke out in the former Yugoslavia, he was rewarded with early retirement, and accommodation in the mentioned barracks near the Deligrad Hotel for military staff in downtown Belgrade. His pension is 750 or 800 dinars a month, that is how much former JNA colonels receive.

He is one of the 16,500 homeless members of the Yugoslav Army. Just like other "deserters" from the army, he has no more illusions about getting a flat in Belgrade or elsewhere in Serbia. Even if the problems of army officers, widely unpopular and cast out of society, start getting resolved at a faster pace, he knows he is among the last on the list for a more decent accommodation than the one he already has.

One of his colleagues, a recently retired Serb colonel who was in a "responsible position" in the former RSK army in Knin last August, also homeless, says that the so-called deserters, the Moslem and Croat officers of the former JNA, stand an even lesser chance of improving their humiliating accommodation status. The same applies to a number of Serb officers who were on duty in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia and Macedonia when the war broke out, and were retired for one reason or another soon afterwards.

Judging by the latest reactions of the General Staff's information service, the authorities competent for dealing with the issue have nothing new to say to the public. In other words, the situation is the same as in 1992, 13,000 army officers and their families came to Serbia from the former Yugoslav republics which had declared secession. For a vast majority of them, the blue sky was the only accommodation offer they received from the military and political leadership.

Families of military personnel were taken care of individually on a temporary basis. They were sent to hotels, army barracks and similar facilities owned by the military. The army has managed to provide only 1,500 flats in the past three years. However, they were given to "some other priority cases" - the expression officers use for those who were more fortunate.

The Belgrade Economic Institute designed a project and presented it as a possible solution to the problem (temporary accommodation, to be followed by gradual construction depending on the inflow of resources). A proposal was also forwarded by expert teams of the Yugoslav Army (VJ) General Staff. Both projects were given to the federal government, which took no further action in dealing with the problem to this day.

Meanwhile, Yugoslav officers temporarily based in the former republics started returning home after the fall of Krajina and the end of the Bosnian conflict, and exerting pressure on the army to start dealing with the accommodation problem.

However, their hopes are very slim at the moment, for the army is virtually bankrupt and unlikely to receive any financial means from the budget in the near future.