Will they ever return home?

The belief that Kosovar refugees should return to Kosovo once peace is restored is naive

Natasha Walter
Monday 19 April 1999 00:02 BST
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WHEN ANY politician or journalist looks into a crystal ball for the outcome of this war, they see the same picture. At some point in the near future Milosevic will be contained, a peacekeeping force will move into Kosovo, and then the thousands upon thousands of refugees will go back to their towns and villages. If any refuge in other countries is offered to them in the meantime, the word temporary is always tacked on. The Daily Mail, in making an unexpected call for asylum in this country for Kosovars, made that very clear: "Britain should offer temporary refuge," it said. "But the sooner the Serbian killing machine is halted the sooner the refugees can start to return, as some day they must."

This attitude means, no doubt, that once the war ends, Britain and all its European partners will start deporting any Kosovar refugees that have slipped in, or cutting off all their means of support. In fact, this government would prefer that none of them get here in the first place. Sometimes ministers say that a few thousand might be allowed in, but more often they deny there is any need for refugees to leave those muddy and crowded camps. Last week, Tony Lloyd said: "Our present position is to keep the refugees in the region. If we are determined to make sure they can go home, they would have to be in the region so they can go back."

But the belief that once peace is declared the refugees should happily walk back to the killing fields of Kosovo is naive. How easy is it to buy a ticket back to the street where your neighbour turned into your torturer, where you were forced on to a bus at gunpoint, where you saw friends and relations killed? After all, Bosnian refugees should have been returning home ever since the Dayton Agreement was signed in 1995. But of around 7,500 who entered Britain up until then, only a few hundred have returned. And it doesn't take much thought to understand why.

Yesterday, I spoke to Adela (not her real name), a 32-year-old journalist who used to live in Sarajevo and came to Britain in 1992. The process for her first application and appeal for refugee status went on until 1995. "I had got myself a Croatian passport just in order to leave the country," she said, "and it took me three years to convince the Home Office that I was Bosnian. When I finally convinced them, they turned round and said, `Well, there's peace in Bosnia now, you have to go home.' They would have deported me immediately but there weren't any flights into Sarajevo just then."

Adela doesn't want to go back, and who can blame her? "There's nothing to go back to," she says. "Everything is destroyed. No one is left there that I know. There is this idea that once you are a refugee you shouldn't be allowed any choice about where you should live, you can just be put on a bus and shipped off to where the governments want you. You stop being a person.

"If we were given a choice, we would go back if it was really safe. But how can we go back when things might fall apart again any time? If you have seen your neighbours and friends turn into enemies who try to kill you, how can you have the trust to go back? It sounds so ideal, that we should all go back. But when you think about each individual who has to uproot again and go back to who knows what, you know that no westerner would want to go through that themselves."

Adela now wants to make her life in London, but she is living, like most asylum-seekers, in a state of suspended animation, moving from appeal to appeal, from one year's "exceptional leave to remain" to the next. "When you haven't lived a normal life for so long, you appreciate the little things - like getting up and going to work and coming home again, no guns, no bombs," she says longingly. Her longing to be able to put down stable roots is being thwarted by our inability to understand that many refugees will never be able to return to their homelands.

Another Bosnian refugee that I spoke to, a 34-year-old woman whom we'll call Anna, who lives in Coventry, is keener than Adela to return one day - but sees that that day might still be years or decades into the future. "A friend of mine went back last year," she said heavily. "And her child walked on to a mine and had his leg blown off."

Anna was held for months in a Serb detention camp in 1992, only protected from repeated rapes, she believes, because she was five months pregnant when she was captured. "How would you feel going back?" she says. "Our homes are completely destroyed, our town is now a ghost town. We need some security. I can't go back until Bosnia is truly Bosnian, not half Serbian. But if that day ever comes, how will my children feel about going back? Two of them were born here. I feel now I must put their happiness and future before mine."

Although I resent comparisons between Serbian actions and the Holocaust, this realisation that refugees should not be forced to walk back to their old homes as soon as a peace is declared came home to me vividly when I recently made a trip to Germany. It was the first time in my life I had ever visited Germany, the country my Jewish grandparents fled in 1939, after my grandfather had been imprisoned by the Gestapo. My grandparents were lucky - they got to stay in England for the rest of their lives. But in Hamburg, their old hometown, I met a cousin of theirs who had been given no choice but to return to Hamburg once the war had ended. Flora Neumann is a tiny, elegant woman of 88. A survivor of Auschwitz, she landed up in Belgium at the end of the war and then went back to Hamburg in 1947, to live next door to the Germans who had stood by while Hamburg was made Judenfrei.

She didn't have much choice. "We were stateless," she explained slowly to me, looking back down more than 50 hard years. "We couldn't stay in Belgium, because they wouldn't give us work permits. England wouldn't admit us. Life was really hard in Palestine then, and our health was bad. So we came back to Hamburg, and stayed."

But it was hardly an easy choice. "I have never felt for one moment since then that Hamburg is a home," she says. Her son is always telling her that when she is dead, he will be off, to Israel. Amazingly, she has managed to confront the past, giving lectures about the Holocaust in schools and colleges. "Some of the younger generation will see it," she says. "They send me flowers and cards after I speak to them. But you still can't discuss it with older people. And even with the young ones, often they look away when I talk. They don't want to think about it, they say, why should we think about it, it wasn't our fault."

I couldn't believe the courage of this frail-looking woman who had faced down the ghosts of such horror, who had lived out the rest of her long life in the very streets where her mother and sister, aunts, uncles, cousins, had been collected up for the trains that took them to Thereisenstadt and Auschwitz.

But, talking to her, I also felt strongly that there are acts of courage that no one should be forced into. As Adela says, refugees are people too, who must make free choices about their futures. If Kosovars don't want to stay in filthy camps on state borders, they should be allowed to move on into other European countries. And we have to accept the fact that asylum may be forever, and recast our ideas about what might happen at the end of this war. When they really feel it's safe, refugees will go home eagerly. Until then, they must be allowed to stay wherever they have fled.

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