Croatia’s Serbs

Marking the tenth anniversary of Croatia's recapture of Krajina

IT HAS been a month of anniversaries in the former Yugoslavia. Three weeks ago world dignitaries gathered in Srebrenica to commemorate the killing of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Serb forces. The next anniversary will receive much less attention. Yet Operation Storm, the Croatian military assault on Krajina, the would-be secessionist Serbian state in Croatia, with its capital at Knin, has left deep scars.

The attack, which began on August 4th 1995, triggered the flight of as many as 200,000 Croatian Serbs. Within hours vast convoys of Serb refugees were choking the roads of northern Bosnia. Franjo Tudjman, Croatia's then president, exulted that Croatia's Serbs had “disappeared ignominiously, as if they had never populated this land. We urged them to stay, but they did not listen to us. Well then, bon voyage!”

Before the war some 600,000 Serbs lived in Croatia, making up 12% of the total population. According to the census of 2001, only just over 200,000, or 4.5% of the population, live there today. Reliable and up-to-date figures are hard to find. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe reckons the number may be higher, pointing out that many Serbs do not want to identify themselves as such. The Croatian government claims that some 95,000 Serbs have returned from other countries in the past ten years. But as many as 40% have come back on paper only. They have reclaimed their Croatian citizenship and their property - and promptly left again.

Sasa Milosevic, the programme director of the Serbian Democratic Forum in Zagreb, which helps returnees, believes that the 2001 census figures are broadly right, and that Serb numbers are now falling because so many who did return were old. He thinks another 150,000 Serb refugees are still in either Serbia or Bosnia. But one survey found that only 14% of those who had not yet gone home might still do so one day. The rest have become citizens of Serbia, Bosnia or whichever other country they fetched up in.

It all sounds gloomy; yet there are hopeful signs. The prime minister, Ivo Sanader, has worked hard to reach out to remaining Croatian Serbs, not least because his government relies on the votes of Serb deputies. Much has been done to return property to those who fled, to the extent of evicting Bosnian Croats who settled in Serbs' houses. This, says Andrea Feldman, director of Croatia's Open Society Institute, represents “the turning of a new page”. This week, too, Montenegro became the first ex-Yugoslav entity to agree to pay war compensation, offering Croatia €385,000 ($460,000) for cattle taken by its soldiers in June 1991.

The biggest problems for Croatian Serbs are the weak economy and job discrimination. Some hesitate to return from Serbia, whose economy is in even worse shape, because they fear arrest as indicted war criminals. But this issue is now being cleared up. Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, and Croatia have agreed to try to close remaining refugee issues by the end of 2006. One thing they want to do is to reduce the number of refugees who register to return home, reclaim property and collect pensions, but still maintain their registration as refugees, so as to collect what meagre social help this status gives them.

This year a sense of bitterness will pervade Croatia's anniversary celebrations. As Croatians see it, Operation Storm liberated Serb-held land. But now Croatia cannot begin European Union entry negotiations because Ante Gotovina, the general who led Operation Storm, is wanted by the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague on charges of murder and ethnic cleansing. Since Croatia has not arrested him, talks with the EU remain frozen.

Article marks the tenth anniversary of Croatia's recapture of Krajina.