A Voice For the Voiceless

The Advocacy Project helps marginalized communities to tell their story, claim their rights and produce social change. We recruit graduate students to volunteer as Peace Fellows with partners.

The Impact of Service



"Speaking with locals and living in a country is the best way to learn about the real lives of citizens, not just the stories in the mainstream media. I will be more critical of what I read as a result of this experience. I also feel even more grateful for my education, and I feel a stronger responsibility to assist others who do not have resources or access to opportunities in their communities."

Maria Skouras (New York University) volunteered in 2011 as a Peace Fellow for eHomemakers in Malaysia.

For more 2011 feedback click here.

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Partner Campaigns > Survivors of the ... > Challenge > Displacement

Displacement

The Bosnian war displaced close to 2 million people both internally and externally. In 2008, the government of Bosnia reported that 600,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) had returned home and 124,600 more remained as IDPs.  In Srebrenica, however, only 3,500 out of 30,000 displaced Muslims have returned to their homes.

The IDPs are mostly widows who lost their husbands, sons, and other relatives during the war and the elderly who are in need of special assistance such as psycho-social care and treatment for chronic diseases. Many of them remain to this day in collective centers and abandoned homes, predominantly in Tuzla and Sarajevo.

One IDP and a BOSFAM weaver, Zehra Ferhatbegovic says the survivors of Srebrenica are treated like “second class citizens.” They are unemployed, scorned by the city dwellers, threatened with eviction, pitied from afar by the whole world, and often manipulated by Bosnian politicians: “Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ If I can’t return home, to where I was humiliated, where my life was destroyed, and lost everything, then I will have a feeling that I must have revenge. And what good is that? But that energy has potential. I will struggle to return, with all my energy, to the end of my life. I cannot start from zero here in Tuzla, but there I can,” says Zehra.

Ilijaz Pilav, the president of Drina, a NGO based in Eastern Bosnia, likes to stress the importance of "sustainable return." He notes that some refugees and displaced from Srebrenica have returned only to find that life is so difficult that they leave again, seeking visas to resettle abroad. Srebrenica is the poorest municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and to date has the lowest rate of refugee return. The challenge is not just to help people come home, but stay home.
     Zehra Ferhatbegovic: Second class citizen in her
     own country

  Passing time: A Srebrenica survivor at the
  Mihatovic center near Tuzla

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There are multiple reasons why the return rate to Srebrenica is so low.

First, employment opportunities in Srebrenica have been very limited and unemployment runs at around 80 percent. Between 1996 and 2000, the local economy was deliberately run into the ground by the municipality of Srebrenica. This was deemed preferable to the alternative – living with Muslims.

Second, Bosniak homes were taken up by displaced Serbs who were themselves expelled from other parts of Bosnia during or after the war, and transported to Srebrenica to live out a drab existence. Bosniak IDPs could not reclaim their homes in Srebrenica until the Serb occupants were allowed to return to their homes elsewhere in Bosnia.

Third, there was the issue of security. Bosnian refugees who attempted to return home to Srebrenica faced intimidation from nationalist politicians in the Serb Republic and from locals in the Srebrenica region. Moreover, when individuals responsible for the massacre remained at large, Bosniaks did not feel comfortable to return home to Srebrenica. It was particularly discouraging for young people. One 2004 AP investigation found that only 20 of the 610 students at High School in Srebrenica were Muslim, and only one of the 55 teachers.

These problems were interconnected. For several years, the international community withheld aid from the region in an effort to force local politicians to permit minority returns. While understandable, this only perpetuated Srebrenica’s economic distress and added to the misery of the Muslim returnees. Yet another problem was lack of information. Many potential returnees did not know how to use laws to their advantage, nor did they have access to simple information about which houses have been repaired and evacuated.

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