(23 Oct 1996) Eng/Serbo-Croat/Nat
Plans by the German government to start repatriating more than 300-thousand Bosnian refugees have raised fears of a humanitarian crisis.
Bosnian officials say there is simply no room to house all the refugees who fled the country during the war.
The former inhabitants of the village of Mahala are returning to find their homes in ruins.
Forty kilometres east of the north-western city of Tuzla, Mahala was overrun by Serb nationalists during the war in Bosnia.
With peace, the Serbs were forced to withdraw. But before they left they did a thorough demolition jobs on the houses they had been occupying.
UPSOUND: (Serbo-Croat)
They burned everything.
It's a story repeated throughout Bosnia, and it's one of the reasons why Bosnian officials are so worried about German plans to start sending Bosnian refugees home.
Around ten per cent of Bosnia's population is living in Germany at the cost of billions of marks to German taxpayers.
The German government says it will not initiate large-scale forced returns of refugees but will seek the voluntary return of the Bosnians.
SOUNDBITE: (English)
There's a whole range of categories of people who will not be considered for returning for the time being. But what we want is to make this process start.
SUPER CAPTION: Johannes Preisinger, German ambassador
The Berlin government is taking a much harsher stance, saying it will return refugees by force if necessary.
Many Bosnian refugees despair about returning to a country that has 80 per cent unemployment.
The U-N's High Commission for Refugees says there's no room in Bosnia for the hundreds of thousands of refugees scattered around Europe.
SOUNDBITE: (English)
As we know, most of the refugees who are in Germany at the moment come from the Republika Srpska, they are Croats and Muslims. They cannot go back there so basically half, almost half the territory of Bosnia Herzegovina is unfit for refugee return and the other half is fit for security reasons but there's very little space, and that's essentially what we are saying.
SUPER CAPTION: Kris Janowski, UNHCR spokesman
There are virtually no houses for refugees in the Bosnian capital as refugees have already moved in.
In the suburb of Grbavica, turned over to the Bosnian Muslims earlier this year from Serb control, apartments have been stripped bare.
Windows, fixtures and even toilets have been removed by the former Serbian residents.
Haris Silajdzic, Bosnia's prime minister during the war and now leader of the Party for Bosnia, says providing sufficient funding for returning refugees is one of the greatest challenges facing the government.
SOUNDBITE: (English)
The problem is that we have to set conditions for the return of those who will return, not making them social problems; not making of them the people who do not have where to stay, where to work and all that. So that's a very complex problem and as far as I can see the German government is approaching this problem with a lot of caution and they want to solve the problem gradually, and I think that's the right way to do it.
SUPER CAPTION: Haris Silajdzic, Party for Bosnia leader, and former prime minister
The Bosnian government is hoping foreign governments will help it build the homes it so desperately needs.
The Swedish government recently donated funds to build houses for 150 refugees in the central Bosnian town of Travnik.
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