Refugees Face Charges of Treason, Rebel Serbs Say

If roving mobs of unruly guerrillas and a round-the-clock symphony of gunfire fail to deter the return of expelled Muslims and Croats, Serbian rebels have devised other means of ensuring the success of “ethnic cleansing.”

By order of the government of the purported Serbian Autonomous Region of Herzegovina, those who have refused to join the onslaught against non-Serbs will be branded deserters and could face trial for treason.

“Those who fled and didn’t want to defend the motherland should be punished,” said Bozizar Vucurevic, who, with the help of a guerrilla Cabinet, rules about one-third of the land that Serbs have seized in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“After every war there is a special status awarded to patriots and defenders--and a different status for those who deserted,” the warlord-governor added.

The different status Vucurevic speaks about means treason charges against males aged 20-60 who failed to take up arms with the Serbian guerrillas who drove their families out.

Relatives of the “deserters” will also stand at the end of the line for jobs and housing, Vucurevic said, when the region’s scarce postwar resources--many of them confiscated at gunpoint from those driven out--are redistributed on the basis of loyalty.

Throughout Serb-held areas of nearly vanquished Bosnia-Herzegovina, the de facto victors have fortified the barriers preventing re-integration in defiance of U.N. orders to allow 2 million displaced civilians to return to their homes. Those who have so far held out against expulsion are also finding no letup in the organized harassment intended to drive them out.

In the closed town of Celinac, near Banja Luka in northern Bosnia, a “war presidency” has issued decrees placing severe restrictions on Muslims and Croats, evoking comparison with the repression of Jews in the early years of the Nazi Holocaust.

Documents brought to the attention of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva indicate that non-Serbs in and around Celinac are forbidden to drive, appear in restaurants or other public places, gather in groups of more than three, telephone out of town without official permission or transact any private property sales.

An accompanying offer of safe passage for those who prefer relocation makes clear that the local authorities’ aim is to compel non-Serbs to leave.

The decree took effect a month ago and is believed to be still in effect. Aid agencies and a special U.N. envoy are still barred from entering the town.

Under terms of an agreement signed by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in London last week, Serbian forces are supposed to end their sieges of the few Muslim strongholds left, and sincere attempts are supposed to be made to restore the ethnic harmony that existed in Bosnia-Herzegovina before the war.

Just two days after the London accord, the Belgrade-based news agency Tanjug reported that Trebinje authorities had announced that those who failed to serve the new Serbian regime were not welcome back.

Aid workers here say they know of no single family that has tried to return. On the contrary, they fight cases of new expulsions daily.

“Non-Serbs are still being forced to leave, and it is extremely difficult for us to do anything about it,” said Natalie Rieorzy, a Swiss field worker with the International Committee of the Red Cross. “The heart of the problem, not just for us but for all aid organizations here, is that we are faced with a choice of not accepting reality and trying to stop the deportations or accepting the reality and helping (those driven out) leave in the safest way.”

In the heavily militarized region of Herzegovina now governed from this city behind the coastal Dinaric mountain range, the official posture is that refugees are welcome to return as long as they recognize their special status and the risk of prosecution.

Even a daytime visit illuminates the danger still lurking for any Muslim or Croat brave or determined enough to try to recover his home. Unlike the situation in many cleansed areas, most of the refugees’ houses in Trebinje remain intact.

“I wouldn’t advise anyone who fled to come back. There is a lot of resentment toward them, because they had no reason to leave in the first place,” said Baja, a 52-year-old Serbian reservist.

Although there has been no inter-communal fighting here since the majority of Muslims and Croats were driven out in June, blasts from persistent fighting with Croats for control of the land south of Dubrovnik resonate from less than five miles away.

In Trebinje and other Serb-held towns and villages between the Montenegrin border and the Neretva River, life remains tense and insecure from the ubiquitous gunfire of drunken reservists in the proximity of the Dubrovnik front.

“We can’t talk about politics, because we don’t know what time will bring here. The other side is so close, they could advance and kill us all,” said a fearful Serbian secretary named Milka, whose desk bears a shrapnel hole from shelling two months ago.

Everywhere there is gunfire.

“It’s nothing to be concerned about,” one fighter said of a midday series of rhythmic explosions only a few blocks away. “The boys like to drink and celebrate when they come back from the front in one piece.”

Most of the fighting in Croatia has subsided since 14,000 U.N. peacekeepers arrived earlier this year and sealed the territorial status quo. Their deployment does not extend to Dubrovnik, which has remained a target in the on-again-off-again battle between Bosnian Serbs and the Croatian national guard.

The Prevlaka region south of Dubrovnik, although never in history a part of Serbia, guards the entrance to Montenegro’s Cotor Bay, which, since the secession of Croatia, has been the Serb-led Yugoslav navy’s only remaining port.

“We are prepared to negotiate for peace. We’ll give up part of our territory to the Croatian canton . . . but in exchange we want access to the sea,” Vucurevic, the self-styled governor, said in an interview at his office, adorned with a spent 130-millimeter shell casing standing four feet high. Nodding their agreement were half a dozen machine-gun-bearing advisers in various castoff uniforms of the Yugoslav federal army.

Trebinje was about one-third Muslim, with a small population of Croats, before Serbian rebels backed by the federal army and Belgrade-based militiamen overran the republic’s eastern territories in April and began kicking out non-Serbs.

Not all Serbian civilians voice support for the strong-arm tactics that were used to “liberate” territories that for centuries were home to a rich mix of religions and cultures. “I have nothing against Muslims. I don’t understand why so many left,” said Dusan Pecelj, a farmer selling grapes at the central market. “Our leaders have split us. It was never up to us, and we couldn’t do anything to stop it.”