Struggling for and Within the Community: What Leads Bosnian Forced Migrants to Desire Community Return?

Abstract

The authors seek to explain the desire for community return by displaced persons in Bosnia. They find a key difference between the minorities displaced from the urban and rural parts of Bosnia. While the rural displaced tend to value community returns, the urban displaced are unlikely to do so; hence the generally low success rate of urban returns in post-war Bosnia. Family dynamics seems to influence community returns, as the decision to return often seems to be made by families, not isolated individuals. Finally, less nationalistic displaced persons seem more interested in return into a minority situation than more nationalistic ones.

Notes

1. The most reliable fatality figures on the Bosnian war have been compiled by the Research and Documentation Center (RDC) in Sarajevo. By June 2007, the RDC recorded 97,207 war fatalities and estimated that the count could rise by a maximum of another 10,000 with ongoing research. The head of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia estimates the number of dead at 110,000. See Bosnia War Dead Figure Announced, BBC News, 21 June 2007, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6228152.stm. The current RDC data indicate that 40.82% of the causalities were civilians; 83.33% of the civilian casualties were ethnic Bosniacs (Bosnian Muslims). See RDC, Research Results and Data Base Evaluation (2007), available at http://www.idc.org.ba/presentation/index.htm. ‘Bosniac’ is the self-selected ethnic identifier for the Bosnian Muslim community. UNHCR, Update on Condition for Return to Bosnia and Herzegovina 2 (January 2005), available at http://www.unhcr.ba/publications/B&HRET0105.pdf.

2. The internally assisted post-conflict return in Bosnia can be divided into three general phases: the creation of safe conditions for return; return of property; and property re-construction and returnees’ reintegration (Porobic & Mameledzija, 2014, p. 4). From 1996 to 2000, international assistance equalled at least 15 billion US$ (Fagen, 2011, p. 4).

3. Minority return refers to displaced persons returning to an area now in the ethno-territorial autonomy controlled by another ethnic group. Majority return refers to displaced persons returning to an area now in the ethno-territorial autonomy controlled by their own ethnic group. In this context, ‘minority’ refers not to a local demographic situation, but to membership in the group which does not possess ethno-political power in the given post-war political entity. Thus, members of an ethnic Serbian family returning to Drvar after the war are ‘minority returnees.’ Although Serbs were the demographic majority in Drvar before and are again after the war, Drvar now belongs to a Croat-dominated Canton. Members of a Bosniac family returning from Germany to Sarajevo after the war are ‘majority returnees’ because Sarajevo is now in a Bosniac-dominated Canton.

4. These numbers are disputed, particularly as to the sustainability of return (i.e. some returnees have returned to reclaim and then sell their properties). See UNHCR, update on condition for return to Bosnia and Herzegovina, supra note 4, at 2; UNHCR, Statistical Summary as at 31 October 2006 (total number of refugees and displaced persons who returned to/within Bosnia and Herzegovina) (October 2006), available at http://www.unhcr.ba/return/Summary_31102006.pdf (Belloni, 2001; Black, 2001). Updated numbers can be found at the UNHCR Bosnia website at http://www.unhcr.ba/.

5. By 2014, there were still about 100,400 registered IDPs in Bosnia—people who expressed a wish to return to the pre-war residence to the authorities and who took steps towards property re-construction (IDMC 2014, pp. 1, 5).

6. Data was collected by Sarajevo-based Ipsos BH, as a part of the project on The Way Home: Peaceful Voluntary Return Project (SMU REB: # 12–224).

7. The sampling frame was stratified based on two variables. The first stratification variable was based on Bosnia’s two entities: Federation and Republika Srpska. The second was based on the coefficient of return (CR) for each municipality. The CR combined the 1991 pre-war Census data with the 2005 estimates of return (provided by the Bosnian Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees; see Nenadic et al., 2005) to express the estimated percent of the pre-war minority population which returned to the given municipality in the post-war period. The median value of the CR for the Federation was 12.49% and the median value for the RS was 14.74%. In the Federation, we randomly selected 12 municipalities where the CR was less than the median and 11 municipalities where it was greater than the median. Similarly, in Republika Srpska, we randomly selected seven municipalities where the CR was less than the median and five where it was greater than the median.

8. We did collinearity diagnostics for the models shown in Tables 2 and 3. The highest variance inflation factor value is 3.57, well below the critical value of 10. Thus, we do not seem to have a multicollinearity problem.

9. Additional statistical analysis indicates that controlling for family income weakens the impact of ethnicity. Sample evidence suggests major differences in median income by ethnic group of the returnees: 400 KM for Bosniacs/Muslims, 400 KM for Croats, 150 KM for Serbs, and 275 KM for Others.

10. For a number of women, time spent in the West or in urban Bosnian areas can be experienced as gender liberation from conservative and patriarchal norms and expectations (Parutis, 2014, pp. 167–171). Research on Bosnian post-war returns to Sarajevo indicates that a major point of contention in the Bosniac community is a clash between the returnees and never displaced over the women’s rights values embraced by some returnees during their time abroad (Stefansson 2004b, p. 64). A study of Moroccan returnees from the Netherlands indicates that young women are generally opposed to return (De Bree, Davids, & De Haas, 2010, p. 504). A study of 2003–2005 returnees to Afghanistan indicates that women and youth find it extremely difficult to adapt to the standard of living and social expectations in rural Afghanistan (Harpviken, 2014, p. 64). Finally, a study of Iranian immigrants to Sweden shows returning to stricter gender roles is a major deterrent to return for women and families with daughters (Graham & Khosravi, 1997, p. 122).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Central European University—Institute for Advanced Studies; EURIAS Fellowship of the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme Marie Curie Actions Co-funding of Regional, National and International Programmes; the Leverhulme Trust; the British Academy; and the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at Saint Mary’s University.