The aftermath of the refugee crisis (1995 until 2008)

126 The difference between “refugee fathers” without land and house, and “rural fathers” who owned both made it possible to simultaneously include and exclude refugees in relation to the moral economy of patriarchal subsistence production. Accordingly, men who did not own, work, and inhabit property could suggest themselves to be refugee fathers who the villagers should include into their (asymmetrical) social security relations. To see how the villagers navigated this inclusion-exclusion over time, I start with the wider social policy changes since 1995. In fact, the early experience of locals chipping in for the state in caring for the refugees repeated itself as the trans-national humanitarian industry moved on. Remembering the history of humanitarianism allowed villagers not only to make claims on resources and to a future generating social relations and support (McKay 2012, 288), but also to actively shape the present configurations of local state welfare.

127 strengthen the refugees’ “personal capacities so that they understand that they do not stall, slacken – so that they become creative, movers, that they have some ideas,” she said. Projects included the purchase of a chainsaw, a milk cow, pigs, chicken or bees, but also courses to learn foreign languages, computer skills or tailoring. This emphasis on micro-projects and monetary help with strings attached stood in contradiction to the aim of assimilation, as it kept the refugees under the tutelage of a project with its project cycles and did not allow them free access to capital. Nonetheless, Lower Village’s refugees did once receive a larger grant to build a pigsty behind the SMZ building – the ruins of which could still be seen long afterwards.

The refugees of Lower Village

During the first few months after August 1995, some 100 refugees circulated through the village, as families reunited. Only a few people in the refugee camp already knew each other, but now long-lasting ties were formed. Between 1995 and 2008 most displaced persons left for other places. A girl went to Belgrade to study, an old man was buried in the local graveyard, a person “leaning towards alcohol” (naklon alkoholu) completely disappeared (but may have gone to live with his sister somewhere). One girl married into the Volovići neighbourhood, one family went to Northern Serbia, others to the USA or Canada (D, Rajka Janković and Simo Lukić, 30.8.2013). Although several people returned to their former homes in Bosnia and Herzegovina or Croatia, this was not remembered by the old local families. What was remembered, however, was that almost everybody wrote letters or returned for holiday visits (ibid).

Pavle, the former MZ clerk, became personally attached to a refugee woman who shared the Old Srez building with him. They married in 1998, and his wife, together with her old mother and her teenage son Mišo, moved into the clerk’s home. However, Pavle’s wife died soon afterwards. Although he did not write over his land to her son Mišo (as Rajka and Simo regretfully noted), Pavle did help a lot when Mišo fell ill and he needed a kidney operation in Belgrade (tI, Boro, 4.9.2013). Later Mišo married Dana from another refugee family living in the House of Culture. In 2002 Dana’s parents relocated to a bigger refugee camp in Smederevo, because the new President of the SMZ Vojo Volović closed the local camp. He invited journalists to pressure the Municipality into paying the SMZ’s debts. As indicated, the refugees had not received much in the form of cash benefits from the (I)NGOs catering for them – nor as non-Serbian citizens were they eligible for monetary social aid through the Centre for Social Work (CSW). Therefore they could not pay the mounting electricity bills from the SMZ bank account and the power supply was to be cut off. The old President of the SMZ Duško Buba

128 Janković did not have the political clout or inventiveness to redress the situation. Vojo Volović now effected a reversal by pressuring the Municipality to assume the debts. Concomittantly the SMZ collected money among locals, renovated the House of Culture and the teacher’s homes, and declared the Old Srez Building a dangerous, off limits structure.

Meanwhile the transnational support for refugees also diminished, and most of those who did not return to Bosnia and Croatia or went abroad applied for Serbian citizenship (project money for this was offered by the Danish Council). Thus in 2002 Pero changed his Yugoslav passport for a Serbian one. Locally the SMZ moved into a renovated former teacher’s house, where Mišo and Dana were again allowed to use a room for free. Despite his kidney disease, Mišo now worked as a day labourer. Over time he won the trust of many villagers, and when Bane Erić and his wife went to agricultural trade shows to promote their rakija, Mišo acted as their night-watchman.

By 2008 Dana’s aunt, who lived in Germany, travelled to Croatia and sold her family’s several hectares of land to Croatian neighbours at a knock-down price (for the difficult situation of Serb returnees in Croatia, see Leutloff-Grandits 2006). The money was partly reinvested into a weekend house (vikendica) near the centre of Lower Village, which had half a hectare of land.

Dana, Mišo and her mother moved in. Dana’s father, who had died in the camp in Smederevo, was reburied in Lower Village’s graveyard. On their parcel of land, the family kept small animals. For instance, in 2011 Dana won a grant from an INGO to buy eight goats for self-help in the form of milk and meat. In 2013 she reduced the number of goats again because they needed too much fodder. Meanwhile she increased her stock of chicken which she bought from Rajka Janković (D, 10.9.2013).

At one point in my interview with the farmer and ex-councillor Boro (“like Tito”) Jovanović, he fascinatingly employed the father motif and the land-workerist ethos to indicate a shift of boundaries between the insiders and the outsiders:

Boro: Well, there were some 50 refugees here, and today some remained … Stanko and Pero…

Me: … Plus those two people who rear goats, those who have a week-end house...

Boro: … Mišo and Dana! Well, ok, they are already ours [oni su več naši]; they bought a house and stayed here (tI, Boro, 4.9.2013).

According to the land-workerist ethos, which Boro shared, the refugee status was connected with being without job, land, house, and future plans. 18 years after their exile began, Stanko and Pero fulfilled these criteria and were therefore refugees in Boro’s eyes. On the other hand,

129 Mišo and Dana, who had married and bought a house and parcel of land, conformed to local values and thus became “already ours” (tI, Boro 4.9.2013).¹¹⁹

As we will see, the status of Stanko and Pero as refugees made them readily appear as needy and deserving of support from the community. However, why had Stanko and Pero not managed to cross the social boundary and “become ours”?

Stanko

The Croatian ex-policeman Stanko (b. 1959), whose fierce looks had scared Rajka at the outset, was not very intimidating when I met him in 2009. By then he appeared to be a witty and good natured, middle aged man who owned a portable sawmill and offered his services of splitting firewood to villagers. In 2010 I met him again when he was enjoying the sunset in front of the weekend house that he shared with his old parents free of charge. When I returned in September 2013, I bumped into him at the shop. Looking tanned and scraggy, Stanko was relaxing after collecting plums for villagers, amusing the shop attendant and the customers. This was how he related his story, seasoned with a likable humour that I unfortunately could not record verbatim:

Stanko said that he had been the strongest man in the village when he arrived, but now he had lost his strength and was idling away his time (dangubi). Presently he found it even difficult to find agricultural day-labour (da nadniće), because the farmers for whom he used to work were now day-labouring themselves. The demise of day labour was also inversely connected to the resurgence of mutual support [the land owning farmers profiting more from such exchanges than the have-nots]. Why had he never returned? He had been in the uniformed forces, for this they would indict him in Croatia for high treason. For one and a half years now he had attempted to receive a pension for his police work – he had been a policeman during the SFRY – but although he proceeded via official channels, the Croatian state was very difficult about it. When a long-established Lower Villager who sat with us tried to tease Stanko by calling him a war criminal, Stanko calmly and convincingly retorted that he had neither taken part in any war actions nor crimes (D, Stanko, 29.8.2013).

I had mentioned above that the German aunt of Dana travelled to Croatia and sold the house, while Dana and her parents had been too scared to do so. Nobody found it likely that Dana or her parents had been war criminals, and yet they had constantly delayed their return. The situation of policemen like Stanko or Pero was even more complicated, because they had heard the rumours about trials without due process in Croatia against former “enemy” forces. The two men’s hopes to return were therefore muted by fear for their liberty and physical safety.

Stanko’s family situation had changed in the summer of 2013. His mother had died, and the funeral was attended by Stanko’s brother, who had married and now lived in Tuzla. At the shop,

119 Boro wondered what Mišo and Dana lived on, as half a hectare was not enough to subsist on. Indeed, Dana was in dire straits and applied repeatedly for benefits at the CSW to cover some of the medication costs for her mother.

130 a villager reminisced how Stanko, tipsy with rakija, had contemplated his future, with his mother dead and his father maybe soon to follow. Stanko had reportedly envisaged selling the land in Croatia and buying a house in Lower Village from his share of the proceeds, which would probably make him ‘ours.’ Pero dismissed this as idle talk (D, 28.9.2013). He harboured his own reasons why he did not believe in such a future for Stanko, or why he himself did not sell his property. In Pero’s story we can follow the trajectory of people oscillating in and out of the refugee status and moving into other identities linked to family status, occupation, and source of income. I turn to Pero’s life history, collated from diverse sources.