Mercy For the Homeless

Still more thousands of distressed people, fleeing from the war, waited six days last week in an endless line of buses, cars and tractors at the frontier between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. The Croatian border guards would not allow most of the men to cross the border. The Zagreb daily "Novi Vjesnik" published the cries of some of them: "We'd rather be Indians than Bosnians. We've had enough. We just want them to let us through Croatia, and then we'll go to Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, anywhere, even Zanzibar. We want to work, we don't want to fight any more. We've had enough."

A "Süddeutsche Zeitung" reporter witnessed this refugee affliction and political bargaining over trains. Last week he wrote: "Not far from the German frontier, the children and the elderly men are sitting in railway cars like in mobile prisons, waiting for some country to take pity on them. Austria, Italy and Germany are bargaining as though these were not people, and the other European countries are behaving as though this does not concern them..."

Around 2.3 million people (500 thousand of whom have found refuge in other European countries) have been left without a roof over their heads since June last year, when the war in Slovenia broke out, to date. Laurens Jolles of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees claimed, in a talk with "Vreme", that the number of refugees is probably much higher, particularly those who have gone to West European countries, because many left without reporting their departure. Even without these data, it is clear that Europe has not faced such a migration since World War II and that, if the war does not stop soon, this wave of refugees could cause instability to many European countries. If the forecasts of at least another million refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina come true, the present flow of refugees from former Yugoslavia could grow into a torrent. Those involved in the refugee drama fear most unrests which an onset of refugees could cause in one of the neighboring countries. Some say that last year's Albanian invasion of Italy would be nothing compared to these horror pictures.

Journalists recently visited the refugee assembly station in Palic, near Subotica, and were informed that around 14 thousand passports were issued here last month alone. Almost the entire population of the Bosnian village of Kozluk (around 2 thousand) was transported in one day by train to Hungary, which has been groaning under the weight of some 50 thousand Yugoslav refugees (mostly from Croatia, and lately from Bosnia-Herzegovina), claiming that all the possibilities for assistance have been exhausted a long time ago. Turning back group of Bosnians at the frontier, the Hungarians accused the Austrians of being selfish and operating with a fine sieve at their frontier crossings. The "Caritas" international humanitarian organization made a similar accusation. Vienna answered by largely shifting responsibility to its next-door neighbors. Austrian Interior Minister Franz Loeschnak explained recently that Austria might find room for one more train full of refugees, but that this train would be followed by a second, third, tenth... After extensive negotiations on the destiny of the two blocked refugee trains on the Croatian-Slovenian border, Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock and his Italian counterpart Vincenzo Scotti last week agreed to take in 6 thousand homeless people. The Dutch Government has also expressed readiness to accept a number of people from those trains.

And while Europe started to show fear of "the blood that is flowing under its door from the Balkans" only when an, until now, unfamiliar wave of refugees started to overflow it, those who started it all continue to fight and bring affliction to people with unabated force. According to some estimates, around 4 thousand people get killed or go missing in Bosnia-Herzegovina every week, while the number of those who move like sacks from one place to another and get deported in the name of ethnic coherence and purity is impossible to determine. Entire city districts and villages continue to disappear in the war affected areas, local ethnic maps are changed daily, and the main squares and gardens in Belgrade and Zagreb keep on being filled with newcomers who ceaselessly scratch at the lottery tickets, dreaming of the grand prize, or drink beer and recount the terrors of war in their own dialects.

The refugee problem has its function in all former Yugoslav republics, as political points have to be won on the tragedies of tens of thousands of people left without their homes and their roots. Slovenia, which used its newly-gained independence to get rid of the superfluous number of "Southerners", today does not want to take in more than the 60 thousand refugees it has accommodated already, even though some UN officials believe this number could be increased. Croatia, which is accommodating over 600 thousand displaced persons, is beginning to stagger under the load, and has intimated that in future it will only allow the refugee caravans to pass over its territory, pointing out the way to Italy and Austria. The latest wave of mostly Muslim refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina was used skillfully by the media in Croatia to again draw the world's attention to the consequences of Serbian aggression, call for an international military intervention and deny its own guilt for the war, particularly as rumors of secret Serbian-Croatian agreements on creating ethnically pure territories are getting louder and louder. Writing about the train people, many leading world newspapers last week neglected to note the observations of some United Nations officials. Director of the UN Children's Fund Sumir Bassa said in Geneva last week that he was shocked, while paying a visit to Croatia, by the way in which the refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina were taken in, and demanded from the local authorities in some towns to be more humane to those people, particularly to the women and children.

Serbia, too, is having an increasingly hard time in accommodating hundreds of thousands of refugees, and there are more and more of those who claim that with the protection policy for the Serbian population in the Krajinas, the current regime in Serbia managed to move out more people in a few months' time that Pavelic's NDH (Independent State of Croatia) did in four years. The number of refugees in Serbia is, reportedly, much greater than the official figure says. Nobody can say even roughly how many fled the country, even though the number of 300 thousand is mentioned most frequently. It is also assumed that there are many who do not want to register for refugee aid so as not to be mobilized and sent to the front. There is also increasing trouble with those who have lost patience and have started appropriating houses and estates using arms, and encouraged by extreme political parties. The village of Hrtkovci is the best example of this in practice, and also some other Vojvodina villages where, in the absence of serious state intervention, the refugees are engaging in the dangerous operation of improving the ethnic profile of these places.

Although many in Europe and the world have shown surprise only now at the tragic consequences of the war in Yugoslavia, it would not be untrue to say that everything that is happening today, particularly the refugee issue, had been planned beforehand. The killing, persecution, migration, encampment and deportation of people of different nationalities, everything that Europe said "never again" to 50 years ago (as somebody remarked recently), was clearly noted and drafted in the notebooks of the ideologists of ethnic states and in the plans of their party's headquarters. In ethnically mixed local environments, national division and Lisbon agreements on the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina simply could not have been implemented without violence, because literally everything had to be divided - from floors in apartment buildings and beds to human souls. The tragicomedy of this was best explained, a few days ago, by the commander of a Bosnian corps who acknowledged certain problems with his soldiers. The boys want to fight and die (read: for an ethnically pure territory) but only on condition that they are fighting for a territory which is one hundred percent included in the maps of their national cartographers.

The chances of the shooting and the river of refugees stopping are virtually nil. It is more likely that "a peace of cemeteries", as "Le Figaro" remarked, will have to be awaited. The national leaders will demand the completion of ethnic and territorial segregation at all costs, regardless of the victims. Even if the war were to stop tomorrow, the stacking and moving of people in national reservations will go on for another ten years at least, and will always be the spark that will alight a fresh conflict. Until that time, trains and trucks full of hapless people, who recall the Vietnamese and Haitian boat people, will continue to leave these former common lands (in December last year, research showed that most citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina believe in a life together and do not support cantonization). One could even say that the Vietnamese and Haitians were better off - with all the risks that could cost them their lives, they lost almost nothing by fleeing, and catching hold of the other coast, they had a greater chance of starting a new life. More fitting to the desperate people in our trains is the ancient Greek logic where being expelled from home was the greatest of all punishments - worse even than death.

Forecast

Thierry Meyrat, head of the International Red Cross mission in Belgrade, stressed in a talk with "Vreme" that hitherto experience in monitoring the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina does not offer the hope of the hostilities ending soon, and much less hope of the refugees returning to their homes, even if they are destroyed.

The representatives of this international humanitarian organization, which has been investing enormous efforts, since the beginning of the war here, to help the wounded and the sick, supply aid and medicine, register and visit the war prisoners and relieve the wretched fate of the refugees with aid packages and information about missing relatives, are in a situation, probably for the first time in their career, to hand out special information to the warring sides about the tasks of the Red Cross, with the appeal not to shoot at people with this symbol. Such explanations and instructions have not always been of great help so far.