Hailing 'sea change,' UN refugee agency closes last field offices in Croatia

The UN refugee agency has closed its three remaining field offices in Croatia, marking the end of an era in which it helped repatriate over 100,000 Croatian Serbs over 12 years and signalling what it called a 'sea change' in the region that gave birth to the term "ethnic cleansing."

The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said today it closed the offices in Knin, Sisak and Osijek - once on the frontlines of war zones and crowded with victims of the conflict following the break-up of Yugoslavia - because local relief agencies and the Government are now meeting many of the needs of asylum seekers and refugees. At the height of the crisis the agency had 10 field offices operating in Croatia.

"After such a dramatic decade, a sea change is the only way to describe" the move which occurred in the last days of 2003, UNHCR said in a statement paying tribute to the hundreds of staff members, most of them local, who risked their lives on a daily basis to protect and assist traumatized refugees amid the worst of the fighting.

A number of the agency's staff and humanitarian partners lost their lives in the process. The period saw UNHCR face one of its most trying moments as it worked to deliver aid to some 3.5 million people throughout the former Yugoslavia in a vast operation directed from its regional headquarters in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, where the agency will continue to work.

As the region's wars intensified, UNHCR staff often worked through the night to assist refugees, sometimes carrying war victims off trucks that had brought the "ethnically cleansed" straight from concentration camps.

Apart from the more than 100,000 Croatian Serbs who had returned to their homes by the end of 2003, an estimated 230,000 internally displaced persons had also gone back. Some 220,000 Croatian Serbs remain in exile, mostly in Serbia and Montenegro.

Noting that conditions have not improved much for today's destitute returnees in the hinterland despite progress elsewhere in Croatia, UNHCR urged international development organizations and donors to help reconstruct infrastructure in return areas, foster jobs and promote other schemes to rebuild returnee communities.