The Pain of Return in Bosnia

SANSKI MOST, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Razija Tabakovic stepped from the Optima Tours bus into a rainstorm. The 17-hour trip from Germany had left her tired, bewildered and dispirited. Now she had arrived at the town that would become her new home.

“The sky was crying along with me,” she said later.

Tabakovic had been here before--the first time as a child. Burned out of their village in World War II, she and her family walked 18 miles to then-safe Sanski Most. She was 6.

At 59, Tabakovic is a three-time refugee. She was forced to leave northern Bosnia-Herzegovina after it was seized by rebel Serb gunmen in 1992; she lived in Germany for the last three years; and this month she was sent back to Bosnia.

In the weeks to come, tens of thousands of Bosnian refugees will be returned from their European havens to a country where war has officially ended but reconciliation remains remote. It is the largest forced repatriation in Europe in half a century.

Germany, refuge to more Bosnians than the rest of Europe combined, is taking the aggressive lead. Having first earned high marks for generosity, but now faced with record unemployment and domestic social pressures, German states are swiftly sending Bosnians packing.

But German officials are not taking into account the refugees’ place of origin. United Nations experts estimate that 60% of Germany’s 320,000 Bosnians are Muslims whose hometowns are now part of the enemy Bosnian Serb republic, the Republika Srpska--leaving people such as Tabakovic anxiously scrambling for housing.

Her home of 35 years, where she raised her children and became a widow, is in Bosanska Dubica, 30 miles north of Sanski Most and controlled by Serbs. German and Bosnian authorities opted to send her here because it was the closest town under Muslim-Croat rule.

Already a city of the displaced, Sanski Most is in a frenzy these days as it braces to accommodate an influx of refugees returning from Germany and elsewhere, who are joining tens of thousands of other Muslims similarly driven from their villages in Serb-held Bosnia but who never left the country.

Buses from Germany, like the one Tabakovic took, arrive daily and are full. Cars with German and Austrian license plates snake through Sanski Most’s muddy streets. Returning refugees with German marks in their pockets are bribing their way into the most coveted apartments and homes.

Sanski Most, which had a slight Muslim majority before the war, was occupied by the Serbs; then it served as the final battlefield in the waning days of a vicious 3 1/2-year war as Muslim-Croat forces retook control.

Its authorities now are among the most hard-line Muslim nationalists, starting with de facto mayor Mehmed Alagic, a retired army general and a war hero to his followers.

City employees greet each other with “Salaam aleikum” or “Marhaba,” Islamic salutations. A weekly radio program, “Light of Islam,” explains Arabic art, features readings from the Koran and is followed by a folksy marching song in Bosnian: “We are the army of Allah / We fight for Islam / We are not afraid of death.”

Wartime mass graves dot the countryside; families of the missing--several thousand in Sanski Most alone--clamor for answers. The Bosnian Serb lines are just a few miles away.

A Different Bosnia

This is a different Bosnia that Tabakovic is returning to. Here she will confront scornful war victims who never escaped as she did and insensitive officials more interested in filling their cities with people as a wall against ethnic enemies than in rebuilding the infrastructure. And she cannot go to her home on the Bosnian Serb side, where indicted war-crimes suspects are still in positions of authority.

“I feel as much a foreigner here as in Germany,” she said a day after her return.

The journey back to Bosnia began for Tabakovic with an order from German authorities to leave Germany by April 30. As a single woman of working age with no dependent children, Tabakovic was among the first group being expelled. Married Bosnians with children must leave this summer.

With the Bosnian war officially ended in December 1995, the willingness to be gracious hosts was fading among German state governments who were footing the bill for the refugees. Public patience too was eroding.

German state officials, in agreement with Bosnian authorities, decided to move Bosnians out of Germany as individual residency permits expired.

These returns are “voluntary,” in official German parlance. Bosnians who have tried to stay after their permits expire have been rousted by police with dogs, sometimes in the middle of the night, and deported, according to refugee support agencies. Their passports are stamped with a prohibition against reentering Germany for at least two years.

Human rights groups, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the U.S. government and even the German Foreign Ministry--sensitive to the international image of Germany herding people onto trains--have roundly criticized the 16 German states for failing to consider the Bosnians’ place of origin.

The United States, concerned that some refugees will be forced back into disastrous circumstances, agreed to take in an additional 7,000 refugees from Germany this year. Priority goes to applicants who were tortured or locked up in detention camps.

Tabakovic is ineligible.

She fled Bosanska Dubica after it was gradually taken over by rural Serbs. Certain she would lose her job as the chief bursar for a sugar mill, and having already received telephone threats, Tabakovic was compelled to sign her house away to Bosnian Serb authorities.

She escaped along a circuitous route involving Red Cross convoys and armed checkpoints and strip searches by Bosnian Serb militia members. She reached a refugee camp in Croatia run by a German humanitarian group, which in turn placed her with a host family in the eastern German city of Leipzig.

But her experience with the family proved disastrous. Tabakovic says she fell into a form of indentured servitude, working without pay while the family collected government reimbursements. Eventually, a social worker befriended Tabakovic and moved her into an independent “container village” for refugees, a motley collection of white metal shipping containers stacked two high on a patch of stony ground. High-voltage wires from an adjacent transformer ran overhead.

It was home, temporarily, for Tabakovic, a soft-spoken woman with curly brown hair and a perpetually worried expression. She hung inexpensive lace curtains over her window and had her own hot plate.

Then the order to leave the country arrived. Two of Tabakovic’s children live in Croatia, but she thinks obtaining a permit to join them would be impossible. Instead, she received train fare to Munich, bus fare to Sanski Most and about $176 for the shipping of her bags and for pocket money.

Her First Shock

The first shock came as the bus crossed into Bosnia from Croatia.

“I had a feeling that I was back in my dear Bosnia, so beautiful--but so burned,” Tabakovic said in Sanski Most. “I didn’t realize that every bridge, every house would be so destroyed. The only thing that remained the same was the River Una.”

The next shock came as she met with the Bosnian bureaucracy and searched for a place to live.

In October 1995, in the final offensive of the war, Muslim-Croat forces captured Sanski Most from rebel Serbs. Many Bosnians thought the government army would then march on to take the Serbian stronghold of Banja Luka, 27 miles east of Sanski Most, and the city of Prijedor, 15 miles to the north and the site of notorious prison camps used to torture the Muslim population. But the war ended, and the push stopped at Sanski Most.

On its “liberation day,” as the Muslims call it, Sanski Most numbered about 500 people. They were stouthearted Muslims and a handful of Serbs who had somehow managed to survive.

Today, with at least a third of its housing stock destroyed by war and looting, Sanski Most is back to its prewar population of about 70,000, officials say, with as many as 30,000 more refugees expected to return by year’s end.

Outside the Office for the Banished, a long line was winding down the street the day Tabakovic arrived in Sanski Most. Faces were nervous and drawn. Inside, a couple of functionaries at a wooden desk with a manual typewriter and a computer made momentous decisions about who would live where.

Bajazit Jahic, the city manager for Sanski Most, said authorities are determined to find a place for everybody.

“There is no Bosnia without Bosniaks,” he said, using the newly fashionable “politically correct” word for Muslims.

Some housing that belonged to Muslims is being restored to original owners who return. Most Serbs fled after the war ended, however, and their homes are being parceled out to Muslims. It is what Jahic calls the rationalization of housing space. Others might call it one more form of “ethnic cleansing.”

Under the rationalization plan, a four-member family is allotted one bedroom, one living room, a kitchen and toilet. If a house has two floors, the original owner can have one floor and a returning family gets the other floor. Complete strangers are routinely required to live together.

No new housing has been built since the war ended, Jahic said.

Jahic is himself a refugee from Banja Luka, where he was the regional police chief. Jahic makes no secret of the underlying goal in populating the Sanski Most area. If Muslims want to eventually retake northern Bosnia--a notion still harbored by many--then they must have the manpower close at hand, drawing refugees home from the many European countries in which they are scattered.

“A lot of people have the idea that they will only come back to Bosnia if they can go to their original homes in Banja Luka,” Jahic said. “But from Sweden, we will never reach Banja Luka. The only way to go to Banja Luka is from Sanski Most.”

While city officials are keen to bring in refugees, longtime residents are worried that a time bomb is being activated. Inadequate housing, few jobs, strained electricity and water systems, jealousies among refugees--all combine in a volatile mix.

Jahic dismisses such concerns. “So now people are being deported from Europe, and in a way I’m glad--it wakes them up,” he said. “Now everyone will understand what it means to be banished and what it means to come back. We know what it feels like to be a Palestinian.”

Night for Weeping

Her luggage deposited in the apartments of friends and relatives of her husband--who died of a heart attack just before the war--Tabakovic spent her first night in Sanski Most visiting and remembering and eating typical foods. She saw her nephew, Saud Filipovic, for the first time in five years.

“I heard you were killed,” she told him, weeping.

Tabakovic sat in the cozy living room of her husband’s cousin, Emir Tabakovic, and his wife, Halima, who were expelled from Banja Luka in 1993. They exchanged stories of their sufferings--of life as a refugee, working in menial jobs below one’s education. Of life during the war, the shelling and rapes and death.

Gathered around a low table, they drank soda and beer. Emir Tabakovic munched on roasted lamb. Razija Tabakovic offered a visitor coffee, pronouncing the word in the standard way: “kafa.” Her in-laws corrected her. It’s now “kahva,” they told her.

Before the war, Serbs, Croats and Muslims spoke the same language, Serbo-Croatian, with only minor regional differences. Since the war, however, nationalists on all sides have sought to emphasize the differences, introducing new words, excising others and changing pronunciations in an effort to claim that they do not speak the same language as their enemies.

Tabakovic said she was surprised to hear the new way of saying “coffee.”

“I cannot get used to it,” she told her in-laws.

“Don’t worry, it’s just your first day,” Emir Tabakovic told her.

“No,” she said, “even on my last day I will not get used to that. It’s how I learned to say it in school.”

“That school is no longer valid,” he said.

Clash of Old, New

The clash of the old and new Bosnia reappeared the next day. Tabakovic took her place in line at the Office for the Banished and was finally assigned housing. To her dismay, she was given space in a house already occupied by a large peasant family in a village several miles outside Sanski Most.

Tabakovic visited the house with a city official. The family, whom she later described as “primitive,” only grudgingly admitted her and showed her a small room upstairs, saying that it was the best they could allow her to have.

Refugees from a village near Prijedor, the family was in no mood to share. And Tabakovic was scared.

When Tabakovic returned to the house later with a reporter, the family made its point all the more clearly. The woman, wearing a black head scarf and billowy skirt typical of rural Muslims, used her considerable girth to block the door, refusing Tabakovic entry.

“I will not let you in!” cried the peasant woman.

“Look, I would happily not come here, but this is where they sent me,” responded Tabakovic.

“Why would they send you here? There is no room for you here.”

“I’ve been expelled three times. I have no place to go,” cried Tabakovic.

“We were under the shelling. My dear woman, I have seen wounded. I almost died.”

“I cried for Bosnia,” Tabakovic implored. “I felt the misery and pain. I regretted a thousand times I was in Germany.”

“Most of us didn’t leave,” shot back the peasant.

“It was not easy for anyone.”

As the two women quarreled, refugee neighbors were becoming increasingly hostile. A group of men sitting over their 10 a.m. beers started to yell at Tabakovic.

“People should move into empty houses!” one of the men called out. “Not where there are already families. Go away.”

Tabakovic, in despair, retreated.

A few days later, she returned with the police. The peasant family had moved additional people into the house. There was no more room. City officials gave her a second place, but it too was already full of refugees. Assigned to a third home, Tabakovic encountered more hostility: The couple who owned the house threatened to burn it down if she tried to enter.

Tabakovic’s search for a place to live continues.

Wilkinson reported from Sanski Most and Walsh from Leipzig.