Gaia is a member of the War Studies Department at King’s College, London. She wrote this piece as part of her internship with Arts4Refugees. Her motivation was to help her peer group understand the unique experiences of post-conflict communities. This article was edited by Cassia Jefferson, a fellow student journalist from Oxford University.
Backstory podcast
Back to the (destroyed) future: The return of child refugees to Bosnia-Herzegovina after the war
Introduction
In a time where we are once again witnessing massive flows of displaced people moving through Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the experiences of war refugees who escaped from and returned to a destroyed home country are particularly relevant. The end of the Bosnian War in 1995 marked a turning point in the lives of countless refugees. This was particularly the case for children who fled the horrors of the conflict, such as the genocide in Srebrenica. As peace gradually returned to Bosnia-Herzegovina, many young survivors sought to rebuild their lives from what remained of their nation’s pre-conflict social fabric and infrastructure.
This article explores the complex journey of child refugees returning to Bosnia-Herzegovina after the war. It will first examine the motivations of their return, then analyse the main challenges they faced once they arrived. Finally, it will examine how, despite everything these children endured, this history risks repeating itself today.
A visit to Sarajevo’s War Childhood Museum motivated me to specifically explore the stories of young people. This section of the population is too often neglected in discussions of wars and their aftermath.
The Return
Several European countries provided temporary protection to refugees
fleeing Bosnia-Herzegovina, with Germany taking on the greatest number of refugees. However, as peace slowly returned to Bosnia, child refugees, some grown into young adults, felt a deep yearning to return to their home nation.
What motivated young people to return to Bosnia-Herzegovina?
For many, their decision was driven by a sense of identity: “they belonged in Bosnia-Herzegovina” and therefore had a strong attachment to their homeland and culture. Despite the long period spent outside the national borders, they longed to reconnect with their roots.
Young people were also moved by the existential need to reunite with family members who had remained in the country. Many sought to find friends and family whom they hadn’t received any news from for months or even years, hoping that they had survived devastating events like Srebrenica.
Another pull factor motivating the return was the desire to contribute to the post-war reconstruction efforts. This sense of responsibility towards the community, combined with the human need to have a role in the nation-building process, served as valid reasons to return for the youth who were forced to flee.
What challenges confronted those who returned home?
Property Restitution
Returning to Bosnia-Herzegovina was complex: it required navigating a country scarred by war, grappling with the legacy of conflict and facing the challenge of rebuilding communities that had been wiped out almost entirely. Most returnees had to deal primarily with the issue of property restitution. The Dayton Agreement, signed in 1995, called for displaced people’s free “right to return to their homes of origin”. However, not all refugees were able to regain possession of houses, business premises and land that easily (Article I.1 of Annex 7, Dayton Accords 1995). Displaced families’ properties were occupied, damaged or totally destroyed by rival communities who had clashed throughout the war. In addition to this, children who returned with their families to regain their belongings had lost all their documents and paperwork proving ownership rights to help them reclaim their rightful residences during the long negotiations (Wilkinson 1997). A legal struggle was thus added to the emotional one.
Economic Reintegration and Education
The war left the Bosnian economy in shambles. As levels of unemployment were very high, finding stable employment to help enjoy some degree of economic security was a significant challenge. Several United Nations (UN) agencies including the International Organisation for Migration and the UN Development Programme developed the Youth Employability and Retention Programme. Although it was implemented as late as 2010, the scheme aimed to addressing youth unemployment. This project provided counselling opportunities and training in employability skills to unemployed youth, highlighting aspects like improving school retention. Yet, much progress still has to be made: estimates today indicate that more than half of the country’s young people are still jobless. We should also bear in mind that Bosnia doesn’t benefit from European Union funds and is still one of the least developed countries in Europe.
Returning children and young adults also faced challenges relating to education as schools themselves often obstructed reconciliation and further amplified still-present social frictions. In fact, the kind of knowledge transmitted to the children focused on completing their studies depended on their origins.
Education was segregated along ethnic lines. This division was seen both in the composition of classrooms and in the content of the curricula, causing social disunities to persist. The resulting dissemination of diverging truths and versions of history hindered peaceful reconciliation among the youth.
Psychological Trauma
The psychological scars of being confronted with violence, losing loved ones and experiencing displacement ran deep. This was particularly the case especially for child refugees returning to war zones like Srebrenica and Sarajevo, where they personally witnessed the killing of relatives and/or friends. The genocide in Srebrenica, which occurred in July 1995, remains one of the darkest chapters in the Bosnian War. Children watched the systematic killing of thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. These children thus experienced severe trauma- many of them were diagnosed with mental disorders, commonly involving symptoms of sadness and anxiety.
Many returnees urgently required psychological support to cope with their convictions that peace was only temporary and that they wouldn’t have time to readapt to their new life before violence reemerged.
The process of healing and recovery was gradual and multifaceted. The NGO Medica Zenica was among the organisations which provided counselling and assistance to young people. This played a crucial role in helping them address the emotionally-charged trauma while reconnecting with their family and rebuilding their lives.
What is the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina today?
The situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina today is far from peaceful. The UN is warning that there may be an outbreak of a new crisis, almost three decades after the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina was signed. Bosnian-Serbs now living in the Republika Srpska are threatening to secede from the country.
These threats have increased in the last two years, after the UN-appointed High Representative responsible for monitoring the peace banned genocide denial (Hajdari 2021). This was in response to Bosnian-Serb leaders’ persistent consideration of the Srebrenica genocide as a myth, their multiple attempts at denying the disappearance of 8,000 people in Srebrenica and their continuous glorification of war criminals. The struggle over the past – an ongoing fight in the Bosnian political debate - is threatening the stability of the present, and it is a threat that might persist into the future.
The youth who witnessed these traumatic events in the 1990s, now in their 30s, argue that the conditions are ripe for another conflict to emerge. Survivors assert that “we have politicians who want division and who support war criminals”. Bosnia is far from a place of reconciliation and stability; haunted by both what happened in the past and the aggressive rhetoric of the present. Faced with fellow citizens' celebrations of war crimes and war criminals, what were then children now have a sense of déja-vu, and fear that history is about to repeat itself.
The War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo
While these children faced unimaginable suffering during the war and encountered various challenges upon their return, their stories reflect the power of hope, determination and international solidarity when rebuilding shattered lives and communities. The War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo is the only museum in the world that has decided to voice these stories in a unique exhibition (War Childhood Museum). This initiative came from a Sarajevan child experienced displacement and later dedicated his efforts to collecting his peers’ stories and items that accompanied them in other conflicts and crises. The memories are tangibly expressed by numerous objects that children from all over the globe preserved and donated to the museum. From diaries to biscuits, from letters to bandaids, the collection continues to increase as children - now adults - donate what they took with them during moments of crisis.
Objects donated by children worldwide to the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, July
Candies, biscuits, sodas and other foodstuffs preserved by children in wars worldwide and donated to the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, July 2023
A teddy bear found by Lejla, a girl living in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war, in a Red Cross aid package coming from Germany and passing through the Tunnel of Hope in Sarajevo, now exposed at the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, July 2023
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