The return of refugees to Bosnia and Herzegovina: Peacebuilding with people

Abstract

The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina has led to two dramatic consequences. The first is a de facto partition of the country between the communities to form more homogeneous ethnic zones. The second main consequence has been massive population movements within Bosnia and the migration of more than a million people outside Bosnia to Western Europe and other post‐Yugoslav states. The contracting parties in Dayton had to tackle both issues: the question of borders and the return of displaced persons and refugees who are not allowed to remain where they found temporary asylum. Responding to these issues, the Peace Agreement defines a new state of Bosnia and Herzegovina by combining both territorial integrity of the whole and its partition into two entities according to the ethnic distribution caused by the war. It maintains and even consolidates the ethnic division of the country by granting a high degree of autonomy to both entities. It establishes for exiles, displaced persons or refugees a right to return to their previous homes. By returning, people have been expected to rebuild the multiethnic composition of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But in that matter the Peace Agreement is ambiguous and inconsistent. It does not provide sufficient safeguards in terms of institutions, guarantees for the re‐possession of property and homes for those who have been evicted, or freedom of movement and security for returnees if they are returning to an entity where another ethnie is dominant. So the returnees have no option other than to go back to the places where their ethnie is in a dominant position. Thus the people in the Bosnian peace process have been used as a tool to consolidate the creation of controversial, ethnically‐homogeous nations in a fragile, multinational state.

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