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COLUMN ONE : After War, Refugees Forever? : Two Bosnian women, one Muslim and one Serb, are mirror-image victims of greed and ethnic hatred. Peace pact guarantees the right of return for millions like them. But few believe they will ever go home.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

One is a Muslim, the other a Serb, and their stories are strikingly similar.

Mensura Muharemovic watched in fear as Serbian gunmen seized her home in the city of Brcko in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina 3 1/2 years ago, then hauled away her husband and young-adult sons. She was forced to sign over her house and belongings to Bosnian Serb refugees to secure the release of her family.

They fled to the government enclave of Tuzla.

Ljiljana Santic thought she was safe when Serbs laid siege to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, 44 months ago, because she was a Serb in a Serbian neighborhood. But Muslim-led police repeatedly took her in for questioning, and children threw stones at her 13-year-old son while adults watched.

Under pressure, she signed papers giving her apartment to a Muslim, in exchange for his helping her escape to the nearby Serbian-controlled district of Grbavica.

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Each driven into exile by ethnic hatred and cynical opportunism, neither woman believes she will or can go home again, despite a comprehensive Bosnian peace agreement signed by the warring factions Thursday in Paris.

The most critical--and probably least feasible--part of that agreement is the right it gives refugees to return home. Few diplomats, human rights experts or refugee officials believe the provision will work. Its failure would leave a festering sore that many predict will erupt into war again in a matter of months or years.

In fact, the war ended partly because the region’s two largest powers, the Serbs and Croats, succeeded in creating “pure” states by ridding their territories of members of other ethnic groups. Returning the refugees would undo this nefarious achievement.

Up to 3 million Muslims, Croats and Serbs became refugees in fighting that has killed 250,000 people since 1991 and turned much of the former Yugoslav federation into a wasteland. Most victims were displaced by “ethnic cleansing,” the wholesale removal of entire populations through murder and forms of intimidation such as rape. Muslims were the biggest victims, but the atrocities were committed by all sides.

Under the 12-part, U.S.-brokered peace agreement, “all refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin” and will be permitted to “return in safety, without risk of harassment, intimidation, persecution, or discrimination, especially on account of their ethnic origin, religious belief, or political opinion.”

But a handful of “confidence-building,” pilot refugee-return projects have failed miserably in the last several weeks, with dozens of families blocked from going home. Some officials estimate no more than 10% of the displaced will ever go home.

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“This is the measure of the success or failure of the peace agreement--whether people move back,” said Keith Mannion, field office director in Tuzla of an international aid agency that is building housing for refugees. “Otherwise, it’s not a peace agreement, it’s an armistice. The war has been stopped in place.”

For Muharemovic and Santic, the prospect of returning home is even more complicated because the fates of their native cities--Brcko and Sarajevo, respectively--are the two most potentially explosive elements of the peace agreement. The future of Serbian-held Brcko is to be decided by international arbitration. Possible resistance by residents of Serbian-controlled suburbs of Sarajevo to coming under the rule of the Muslim-Croatian federation, as stipulated in the pact, is another concern.

Muharemovic was an office clerk when the war started. After her husband and two sons were taken away, the Serbs who controlled Brcko placed a Serbian family in her home. Her husband and sons spent months in a forced labor camp, from which Muharemovic said they were sent to blow up mosques, part of the Serbs’ campaign to eradicate all signs of Muslim life. She decided she had to get them out.

“Many others [in the camp] were killed,” said Muharemovic, 48. “If I had left them there, they would probably have died.”

Before a judge and attorneys, she signed a document “donating” her home and its contents to the Serbian family that had been living with her. The husband and sons were released, and the family made its way to Tuzla, on bus and by foot, where they live in an apartment borrowed from a woman who moved to Croatia.

Muharemovic said no one in her family has found work in Tuzla’s moribund wartime economy; she bakes cakes for sale at the market.

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“Everyone wants to go back to their own house,” said the auburn-haired woman, wrapped in coat and scarf against the cold on a recent morning in the Tuzla market. “That’s why there will be more fighting in the spring, because no one is in their own house.”

Santic was caring for her critically ill son, Dejan, in their Sarajevo neighborhood when the barricades went up following a referendum on Bosnia’s secession from the former Yugoslav federation. The Serbian siege of the capital began.

“I thought, I am a woman, I am not interested in politics. . . . I will stay in my apartment and care for my son, and that will be enough,” she said. “I thought I was in a Serbian municipality. I made a mistake.”

Santic worked for the board of directors of a large export-import company. She said that she and members of the board were accused of being “Chetnik” [Serbian extremist] spies. Police took her in for questioning six times, each incident further raising the suspicions of her neighbors and making her life miserable.

“Children threw stones at my son,” Santic, 45, said. “People watched and did nothing. He lost two teeth.”

She held out for nearly two years, until a Muslim man began to pressure her for her apartment. Finally, she relented when he offered to aid her escape in exchange for her deeding over the property. “He was open and direct. ‘I will help you,’ he said. ‘I will take your apartment and you will leave, but do not expect to come back,’ ” Santic recounted. “I signed, of course.”

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Santic had trouble when she first reached Serbian-held Grbavica. Her new Serbian neighbors questioned why she had stayed in government-controlled Sarajevo for so long; they suggested she was a spy. She soon overcame the doubts and took a job with the local government after moving herself and her now-recovering son in with her mother and brother. (She was interviewed in Grbavica for this story.)

“I experienced that [multicultural] life, and I cannot trust it,” she said, explaining why she has no intention of returning home. “Nobody is so white, nobody is so black. All sides are responsible for this situation.”

Fear, mistrust and psychological trauma are only some of the reasons people will be reluctant to go home. The musical-chair pattern of refugee movements in Bosnia complicates any return: Families are driven from an area and their abandoned homes are occupied by other refugees, who themselves have fled their homes. Each return, then, displaces people who may not have anywhere to go.

The peace agreement, reached last month after weeks of negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, sets up a nine-member appointed commission of Serbian, Croatian, Muslim and European officials to handle refugee returns. It provides for compensation from a fund, yet to be created, when a property cannot be restored to its rightful owner. In addition, deeds and transfers executed under duress, such as those signed by both Muharemovic and Santic, will be voided by the commission.

Some refugees may return to areas recaptured by their government, such as parts of northwestern Bosnia taken by the Bosnian government in the last days before an October cease-fire. Still, those who work closest with refugees are among the most skeptical.

“It’s very nice on paper, but even if people want to go back, it’s not likely they will be able to return,” said Mannion, the aid official in Tuzla. “They won’t go back to a new state governed by people who kicked them out.”

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That especially is the case for the refugees from Srebrenica, a former U.N.-designated Muslim “safe area” that was overrun by the Bosnian Serb army in July. An estimated 32,000 people were expelled, and at least 5,000 men are believed to have been massacred. The peace plan allows the Serbs to keep Srebrenica.

The refugees settled in the area of Tuzla, a northeastern Bosnian town that is about to become the headquarters for 20,000 American troops serving in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led peacekeeping force required by the Dayton agreement.

Like most Srebrenica natives, an estimated 70% of Bosnia’s displaced are rural villagers whose transfer to cities, where they are not always welcome, has upset the cultural and social balance and further strained what is left of the economy. Most are poor and could not find work, even if prewar industries were revived.

Bajro Tusunovic is the only man in his family to survive the fall of Srebrenica. He escaped with several thousand men who trudged for days through the forest, encountering Serbian ambushes along the way. Only about a third of his companions made it, he said. Tusunovic, 30, lives with his wife and four children in an old schoolhouse on the outskirts of Tuzla, along with 140 other refugees.

“If you asked me before, my only wish was to stay alive and visit one more time the graves of my beloved ones,” he said as women stirred cans filled with laundry on top of a wood-burning stove. “But I will never go back to live under their [the Serbs’] boot.”

Dzevad Tulkovic, another Srebrenica refugee, lives with two other families in one of the school’s rooms, where a dozen crude bunk beds stand side by side. He tries to rationalize the loss of his city.

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“Nothing can replace my own home,” said Tulkovic, 34. “But since we can’t be there, it’s all the same. We just want the war to be over. I would not feel so sad if I knew that [sacrificing Srebrenica] was really for peace.”

With donations from Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands, among others, Tuzla’s local government has proposed the construction of 15 to 17 settlements for the Srebrenica people in the Tuzla area, a tacit admission that they will never go home.

“The hope of returning to Srebrenica is impossible to wipe from the heads of the people of Srebrenica,” said Fahrudin Salkovic, Srebrenica’s mayor-in-exile. But, he added, “The reality is it would be very difficult to get back to Srebrenica. If the world wanted us to stay there, they would have kept Srebrenica out of Serbian hands.”

Many of the city’s families can’t go back simply because there are no men left among them, making rural resettlement impossible.

“We will have many demographic ‘black holes’ in Bosnia for generations,” said Mirza Kusljugic, an official in the Tuzla municipal government. “Some territories will never be populated.”

Serbian refugees have also been discouraged from returning to their ancestral homes in the Krajina region of Croatia by Croatian army units that have burned and looted entire villages. Close to 200,000 Serbs were driven from the area during a Croatian army offensive in August.

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In the three weeks since the Dayton agreement was given initial approval, Bosnian Croat militias have repeatedly torched homes in several villages that the accord returns to the Serbs. Homes that would have housed returning refugees.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

FACT SHEET: Bosnia on the Internet

The Pentagon is offering a new way for the public to monitor U.S. participation in the unfolding Bosnia peace mission: the Internet. It has created a site, called BosniaLINK, on the World Wide Web containing operation maps, fact sheets, briefing transcripts, speeches and congressional testimony, news releases and biographies of key commanders. The address is: https://www.dtic.dla.mil/bosnia/

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