BUILDING PEACE IN THE BALKANS : Balkan Refugees Must Overcome Barrier of Hate to Return Home

“All refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin.”

--Annex 7 to the Dayton Accords

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For the three elderly and frightened refugees who fled the Balkan turmoil last summer, getting home should have been easy from here.

All had documents proving who they were and where they had lived. The family home remained intact, so they had a place to return to, and the 65-year-old pensioner, his wife and his 88-year-old mother hardly seemed the stuff of war criminals or security threats.

For good measure, they had three daughters, a sister, a brother and four nephews at home in Croatia pulling to clear away the bureaucratic hurdles to a family reconciliation.

The case should have been cleared in a few weeks.

It wasn’t.

Instead, the confused, emotionally exhausted trio was sent on a tortuous administrative obstacle course followed by a three-month wait in a tiny, squalid motel room in this Hungarian border town.

When they finally departed for home Thursday, more than four months had elapsed since their first applications.

The problem wasn’t hard to find: They were Serbs trying to return to Croatia.

The saga of Mile Momcilovic, his wife, Milja, and his now seriously ailing mother, Sava, carries some sobering messages for the brave souls trying to build on the shaky peace in the Balkans.

While the Momcilovics were refugees from war in Croatia rather than Bosnia-Herzegovina, the issues--and the attitudes--are inseparable throughout the Balkans.

Despite the lofty wording of the Dayton agreement, governments on all sides are actively discouraging the return of ethnic minorities to their homes.

The fact that so few have returned to Croatia, where relatively stable conditions should make it easier for the peaceful, dignified return of refugees envisioned at Dayton, merely underscores how hard this task will be in Bosnia.

The family’s fate also reflects the mood in the Balkans: Serbs, Croats and Muslims may have stopped fighting, but they continue to hate and distrust.

With few exceptions, those steering events, whether in Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo or Pale, are driven far more by a desire for vengeance, retribution and ethnic separation than by any perceived need for reconciliation.

This mood helps explain why about 90% of the estimated 180,000 Serbs who fled their homes in August, after Croatian army forces recaptured large parts of the country from rebel Serbs, are either too frightened to return or do not want to after learning that their homes were destroyed or taken by Croats driven from Serbian areas of Bosnia.

The situation in the lone remaining Serb-controlled area of eastern Croatia is even worse. Authorities there have not allowed any of an estimated 100,000 Croatian refugees back since they fled four years ago, although few have expressed any desire to return as long as Serbs remain in power in the region.

“In attitude and policy, there is a thinly veiled scheme at work here that’s based on an exchange of populations,” said an official at the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, who declined to be named. “What’s happening is unacceptable. Our belief is that Annex 7 applies to Croatia.”

Petar Mrkalj, director of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, said senior Croatian officials told him that they are guided by a policy of preventing the reemergence of Serbian majorities in southern towns and villages where Serbs once predominated.

He said the return of Serbian refugees to Croatia is frequently blocked by demands for a certificate of Croatian citizenship--a document few in the region managed to get before it fell to Serbian control in the late summer of 1991. Because the document is issued only in Croatia, it is impossible for a refugee to obtain.

In an interview, a spokeswoman for Croatia’s Office for Displaced Persons and Refugees, Ana Markuz, admitted that the squeeze is on, but she insisted that it is aimed solely at pressuring Serb-controlled areas to accept Croatian refugees.

“I don’t want to say ‘force them,’ but we have to force them,” Markuz said. “They have to see we won’t let their people return if ours are not allowed to come back.”

The statistics tell their own story. Of up to 18,000 Serbs who international aid workers say want to return to Croatia, fewer than 700, mainly elderly people, have made it so far.

The human tragedy behind these numbers is far harder to measure. The three elderly Momcilovics, for example, have been on the move since the night of Aug. 5, when Serbian irregulars fleeing from advancing Croatian forces passed through their village and warned them to run for their lives.

Twelve days and about 400 miles later, they settled in a half-finished house with three other families in the Serbian town of Pancova. But after learning that people who had stayed in their village had survived, they decided to return.

Initial information that they merely had to identify themselves at the border with something as simple as a driver’s license soon dissolved into confusion.

“We couldn’t get any answers,” noted Mira, one of the daughters who worked to cut red tape from Zagreb, the Croatian capital. “We called different border posts and got all sorts of conflicting answers. When they found we were Serb, there were more barriers.”

The three eventually left Serbia for Budapest, Hungary, where Croatia has a full embassy. But there the crowds, long waits and confusing demands for new documents exhausted them.

While their daughters and other relatives continued the battle in Zagreb, they retreated to a seedy motel here about a mile from the Croatian frontier.

There, they waited. And waited and waited.

As the weeks went by, Momcilovic watched his wife slip into depression. She lost more than 40 pounds and talked of suicide. His mother lapsed into a coma, then emerged to hover somewhere in between.

“Every time I wake up at night, I listen,” Milja said. “Is she breathing? Is she alive?”

Other refugee families showed up at the motel and either made it across to Croatia or gave up and drifted back to Serbia.

On Tuesday, when Mira made a routine call to the refugee office in Zagreb, she discovered that the person who had dealt with her parents’ case no longer worked there. A new voice informed her that approval could take another year.

Wednesday, official approval came, special delivery.

“We don’t know why it took so long,” said Mira as she prepared for the 300-mile car trip that will take her parents and grandmother on their first leg home. “We don’t know why it finally worked.”