Nation-building on the ground in Bosnia

Date: 14/07/05

Every two weeks Karsten Holländer receives a new mission. As a soldier in the German army, Holländer is currently participating in EUFOR, the EU's peacekeeping mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

Based at Camp Carreau at Rajlovac, north-west of the capital Sarajevo, it is a world away from the convoluted decision-making in Brussels and the months of negotiations that were needed before EUFOR took over from NATO's task of stabilising BiH in December 2004.

In short, he is at the sharp end of EU military operations.

But much of Holländer's work is not what civilians would usually think of as military operations. He only carries a weapon if he is away from base for more than 40 minutes and heads what EUFOR calls a Liaison Observation Team, which makes contact with the local population.

It is part of what EUFOR says is its main role - reassuring the population and winning hearts and minds.

According to his superior, Lieutenant Colonel Hans Joachim Lange, the team's task is to "feel the pulse of the population".

"We should get open information about the economy, social life, problems. We just talk to people, we are not an intelligence service," he says. "We try to be the nice guys to whom people can talk about their problems."

This week, along with two other soldiers and an interpreter, Holländer has been asked to report on the current situation for BiH's internally displaced people and immigrants in the region under his command. Other missions include surveys of the banking and insurance sectors and the religious structures in the area.

In his area he says displacement "is a big problem for a few people".

As part of his survey, Holländer visits a camp near the town of Rakovica on the outskirts of Sarajevo. It was built for those who were forced to flee their homes when fighting broke out across Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 and in the three years of vicious internecine violence that followed.

Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) fled from Serb and Croat fighters, Serbs fled from Bosniak and Croat fighters and Croats fled from Bosniak and Serb fighters.

In total two million people are believed to have been displaced. In 1996, an estimated 1.2 million were displaced internally.

Safeta Sewar is one such refugee. She lives with her husband and three children in one of the 36 flats at Rakovica camp. The family, Bosnian Muslims, fled from the southern town of Trebinje at the outbreak of the war. Before arriving in Sarajevo and Rakovica, Safeta and her family fled to neighbouring Montenegro. They have been in Rakovica for two years.

With Trebinje now part of the Bosnian Serb area known as Republika Srpska, Safeta says there is nothing in Trebinje for the family to go back to. Their wooden house in Trebinje, although standing, is empty and she is worried about the health of her son who recently had part of a cancerous lung removed.

In Rakovica she receives €42 a month for herself and her family from the Canton of Sarajevo. Her husband is a carpenter but does only odd jobs.According to the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights only around 20% of people have returned to areas where their ethnic group makes up the majority."There are a lot of people who do not want to go back to where they came from...they are afraid because they left their homes ten years ago," says Lange, but he says it is impossible to decide about the political future of BiH without solving the problem of returnees.

The 1995 Dayton peace accords that established BiH set out the return of refugees as an important political goal in stabilising the country.

As Safeta tells Holländer, because the family has a house in Trebinje, the Canton of Sarajevo wants them to leave their new home.

Meanwhile Safeta is asking for some assistance for her 13- year-old daughter to go to school. She is doing well but needs a stipend.

"I don't have the money and the people do not understand," says Holländer, admitting that sometimes the soldiers get stuck between the needs of the local population and the needs of the international community. "I am here to listen. That is something hard to cope with, we can listen but we cannot change anything.

"That is part of the programme, that people should become independent. Before there was always someone who would give them the money but now we are in the nation-building process, they should stand on their own feet."

Feature on the day-to-day tasks of the EU's peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the situation of internally displaced people in the country.