November 21 marked the 10th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords, which brought an end to the war in Bosnia. As a result of this war, 200,000 people lost their lives and two million people, fifty per cent of the state’s population, were internally displaced or refugees.
One of the key elements to the Dayton Peace Accords was the right of return – that every refugee has the right to return to their pre-war home and pre-war community. Only with significant refugee returns could it be considered that the nationalists responsible for the war had not won. While the fighting may have ended ten years ago, the driving goals of the war continue to motivate enough people in Bosnia to ensure that ethnic nationalism still dictates the political agenda. At best one can say that the verdict is still out, but realistically the nationalists dominate over the multi-culturalists and over those who believed in Tito’s united south-Slavic umbrella state, of which Bosnia was in many ways the geographical and cultural heart.
The fundamental right of refugee return was of course the right idea, however given the very real obstacles to its successful implementation, was the intense concentration of financial and political resources too narrow? Consider some of the following issues:
- Security was the foremost concern of any would-be returnee. The international protection forces claimed that they would provide security in the event that anything happened to the returnees. However given the record of protection provided by international forces during the war, and the real likelihood – or un-real likelihood - of assistance materializing in the middle of some night when extreme nationalists might again come to drive returnees from their home, few refugees felt any comfort. As an additional challenge, numerous stories of miscommunications between the international police forces in Bosnia who could not understand each other’s English over the radio made the promises of security even more ridiculous.
- Economic challenges. Clearly without some minimal level of economic stability and prosperity for both returnees and others Bosnia’s state-building efforts would either again devolve into conflict, or would simply wither as people would emigrate for better job opportunities. Returnees faced an even greater challenge in finding jobs. If they had been refugees abroad returning as part of a majority population they were often discriminated against by those who were jealous that they had been out of Bosnia during the war. If they were minority returnees chances of receiving jobs in majority-dominated areas were even lower. Add to this that many were from villages but after spending the war in big cities many were unlikely to be able or willing to return to agricultural life as they had previously known it. This counters the general trend of emigration from rural areas.
- Education. While some were pleased with the new nationalistic educational pedagogy, many were not but had no other choice. Minority returnees faced this to a far greater degree, as their children were likely to be subjected to the nationalist agenda of the local majority. Currently there are efforts to further divide the curriculum such that children can be taught in their own language – Serb children in Serbian, Croatian children in Croatian and Bosniak children in Bosnian. Given that this was one language, Serbo-Croatian, with differences that approximate the differences between British and American English, this new approach furthers division and is a tremendous waste of resources in a country which has none to spare.
These are just some of the challenges which have dominated for the past ten years in Bosnia. The international community pushed for minority returns and to an extent they have happened, with approximately half of those who were displaced by the war returning to their prewar homes, many in areas where they are the minority ethnic group. But how many of those returnees are young adults and families, rather than their aging parents? And how many have succeeded in obtaining jobs – and if they have jobs, how many are actually paying jobs?
Post-conflict situations are obviously never easily resolved, and absolutely every solution has its own series of problems. Strong advocates of refugee return argued that allowing relocation would be the same as allowing the nationalists to win out. Many refugees wanted to return. However they wanted to return under certain conditions – safety and dignity, and with prospects for normal lives. After four years of war return to your home did not mean return to normalcy. So many conditions had to be met to allow a return to normalcy that it calls to mind the Dutch boy trying to plug one hole after another in the dam that keeps springing more leaks.
The Open City initiative of 1998, declared the Year of Minority Return, was based on a hope that assistance to towns for both minority returnees and others would provide sufficient carrots so as to trigger a domino effect of return and positive change. Would-be returnees who feared the opposite domino effect had little comfort besides international community ideal hopes that it would all be ok. It is easy to sit on the sidelines and say that people must take certain risks to return to their homes. It is much harder to be the one to bring your own family into that situation, especially after escaping it once already. Refugees who chose to remain in a city where they were now part of a majority, and had perhaps somehow already started a new life, did not have access to international assistance to relocate for fear of rewarding the nationalist agenda. This disregarded a (theoretically) fundamental right of refugees to voluntary return – how voluntary can the return be if you have nothing and are told that the only assistance you will receive in starting a new life is assistance to return to your home where we hope that everything will be ok? By insisting on the right to return as the only viable choice and the key to Dayton’s success, the international community was essentially blindly ignoring the fact that by not intervening in the war or allowing the Bosnian Army access to arms, it had already allowed the nationalist agenda to determine what kind of a country Bosnia would be.
Refugee return can not undo much of the harm that was done during the war. It is appropriate to have been included as one choice – but so should have relocation. People should have been given information and assistance packages which they could choose to use as they saw fit for themselves and their families. Individuals who accepted international assistance to rebuild their prewar homes where they would return as a minority were chastised when they sold their homes and relocated – however they simply found ways to implement a durable solution to their problem when the international community would not provide it. Return advocates argue that not being able to return means that many people will never be able to overcome their hatred for the other side – true. But so will insistence that return is the only viable option when it is often not a viable option.
The first lesson is that the price of conflict is far greater than the price of conflict prevention. This will almost always be the case, and given the price of modern warfare and recovery from it, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which this is the case. The second lesson is that no centralized decision making body, no matter how well intentioned, can make better choices for millions of individuals than they can for themselves, especially when each choice involves significant personal costs. Only the individuals themselves can have the best chance to make the right decision for themselves. Resources that were exclusively focused on promoting minority return would have been better put to use if they had focused on promoting choices between return, relocation, and where feasible, resettlement.
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