Albright Presses for Return of Refugees to Sarajevo

Ending a two-day visit to Bosnia, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Monday pressed national leaders to speed the return of refugees to their former homes, a step seen as vital to rebuilding the nation still deeply divided in the wake of a bitter ethnic war.

“This is a tough challenge, but it must be met,” Albright said at a news conference at the end of her trip. She pointedly criticized Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim member of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s multiethnic, tripartite presidency, for not moving faster to return more minority refugees to Sarajevo, the capital, which was once an ethnic patchwork that mirrored the multicultural nation but is now almost exclusively Muslim.

“There can be no just peace in Bosnia unless Sarajevo is an open city--a center of life and culture, as well as government, for all Bosnians,” Albright added.

U.S. officials estimate that since the fighting in Bosnia ended 2 1/2 years ago, only about 700 to 800 non-Muslims have returned permanently to the city, which had a total prewar population of about 650,000.

Standing next to Albright at the news conference, Izetbegovic acknowledged that progress on the return of minorities has been slow, but he said the reasons have included the need to find accommodations for Muslim families who would be displaced by those coming back and the political sensitivities inherent in the return of minority Serbs and Croats in the aftermath of years of ethnic violence.

Roughly 475,000 of the estimated 1.8 million refugees from the war have returned, but most have not gone back to areas where they would be a minority, either because they have been blocked by local officials or because they still feel unsafe. Coaxing their return is considered essential to diminishing the danger of an eventual partition of the country into ethnic enclaves.

The secretary, who left later in the day for Moscow for this week’s U.S.-Russian summit, traveled to Bosnia mainly to drum up support for moderate candidates campaigning in advance of national elections scheduled for Sept. 13-14.