The New York Times
Tuesday, June 8, 1999
DISPOSSESSED SERBS
The Refugees of a Past War Still Suffer
By CARLOTTA GALL
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- For five years they have lived, four adults in a single room, in this drab compound of makeshift huts on the outskirts of Belgrade. The Sehovac family, Serbs who fled Sarajevo in 1994, are sunk in a world of depression and bitterness.
Goran Sehovac, 21, is in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the chest down since a bullet shattered his spine when he was 16. He is a hulking man now, spilling out of his battered wheelchair, but his muscles are flabby. His father, Kosta Sehovac, bare-chested in the heat of a Sunday afternoon, slumps by the table, a sullen anger in his eyes.
"This is our misery as refugees," he says, gesturing around the cramped room lined with bunk beds. There is a table, a chair, a refrigerator and a television set. In Sarajevo, they had an apartment, a house and a car. Even the garage had central heating, Sehovac said. "We lived well before the war," he said. "Now there is no way back."
At least they have a bathroom of their own. Others in the compound, invalids among them, have to share three toilets among 20 families.
Nevenka Sehovac, Kosta's wife and Goran's mother, is the family's only breadwinner. She works in the central market in Belgrade, where she sells cheap T-shirts and shorts. She has a soft face and tearful eyes, but her jaw is set hard.
"It doesn't get any better. Every day is more difficult," she says, standing by her stall. "I can buy food with my earnings, but milk is almost a luxury."
The Sehovac family is part of a huge dispossessed community in Serbia. There are half a million Serb refugees from the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, and 177,000 in Belgrade alone, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. undersecretary general and the emergency relief coordinator, who met with some of the refugees during a recent visit to Serbia, described their living conditions as "subhuman."
They have been joined by 11,500 refugees from Kosovo, most of them Roma, or gypsies, and ethnic Serbs, who have fled Kosovo over the two months of NATO bombing.
The refugees live all over the country in disused army barracks, workers' camps, holiday homes and hotels. They are stateless, with no citizenship, no valid passports, no vote and few rights. If they work, they do so illegally, "on the black," as they call it.
Kosta Sehovac is unemployed, his wife explained. "There are no jobs for the people here, let alone for refugees."
The Yugoslav government, enduring a failing economy hit by years of war and sanctions, helps the refugees by providing some free food, but little else.
And now government officials and local aid organizations are bracing for a new wave of refugees: Serbs from Kosovo. Many are expected to flee as NATO takes control and Albanians return to their homes.
If Albanians come back in large numbers, NATO forces may be unable to control revenge killings, aid officials warn. That in turn could precipitate a wave of new refugees, on a scale similar to the exodus of Serbs from Krajina in 1995. Then 170,000 Serbs fled their homes in two days. Many of them arrived in Belgrade in tractors and horse-drawn carts and today still occupy most of the public buildings.
At Krnjaca, there are already two families of refugees from Kosovo.
Mirko Mrdalj is a refugee twice over. He fled with his wife and tiny daughter from Krajina, a part of Croatia where Serbs were living, in 1995. They were given a room in a disused military barracks in Urosevac in Kosovo where they lived for four years. Then when NATO began bombing, they fled once again, with few belongings, and came to Belgrade.
Now he has left Kosovo because his 6-year-old daughter needs hospital treatment. His own expectations were zero. "There is no future here," he said looking around at refugees sitting slumped outside their rooms in the afternoon sun. "They are more or less all unemployed and without money."
"Kosovo is also without prospects," he said. "No one knows which is better."
Kosta Sehovac has no doubts in his mind. Unemployed for five years, sitting at home looking after his disabled son while his wife works every day in the market, he does not try to hide his frustration. He says he fought for two months near his home village before his son was wounded.
"I was two months in the trenches; we were like cattle, and for what?" he said. "I feel so sorry for the Serb people who are still down there" in Kosovo. "But maybe it is better to stay there and get killed. I think it would have been better for me to stay behind and get killed."
His words hang in the room. His younger son walks out of the room and goes outdoors without a word.
In a room across the compound, Marija Bardak, 41, jokes with her neighbors, sitting beneath a clothesline.
Ms. Bardak, mother of three, says she is finally leaving after six years in Krnjaca and going home to Republika Srpska where she has managed to reclaim her apartment.
She had no advice for the Serbs in Kosovo, she said. "My wish was never to leave my house. People do not understand what it is, to have to leave your home. It is like someone cuts off your legs, it is like losing some part of you," she said. "But when you have children, you have to leave."
