Conference in Novi Pazar
READMISSION AND THE
SITUATION OF RETURNEES
9th - 11th May 2007
According to Kadrija Mehmedovic, president of the "Reintegration" organization dealing with the problems of returnees from Western Europe, the problems began when the returnees started arriving in this part of Serbia in 2001. Every 4th inhabitant of the region used to have a refugee status in the EU.
Reintegration was founded in 2004. Back then, the returnees had to pay customs fees for their luggage, the Readmission Office on Belgrade Airport wasn't set up yet and they were totally uninformed of anything.
Reintegration's experience is that it takes at least 5 months for a returnee to obtain personal documents in Serbia.
The returnees' children are the ones with the most difficult problems because 50% of them don't speak Serbian, so they take a year or two to adjust and integrate into the education system and many of them abandon school (30% of the returnees' children quit further education after coming back to Serbia).
Reintegration would also like to implement an education program for adults.
Another big problem is the lack of school facilities in the town of Novi Pazar itself. The children go to school in 3 shifts and each group has up to 40 children. Until the year 2000, the groups didn't have more than 25 pupils each. But with the influx of the returnees' children has rendered the local school facilities insufficient.
The returnees also have major problems with personal documents - one should pay all the administrative fees, renew old documents, etc. Until this is done, a returnee can't use the right to health care. There is also the legal obligation to pay all the taxes he hasn't paid while being away.
According to Reintegration's records, around 600 returnees are homeless at the moment.
No social apartments have been built for the returnees in Novi Pazar.
250 children attend Reintegration's school program, studying Serbian and also the language of the EU country from which they had to return.
Semiha Kacar - president of the Sandzak Committee for Human Rights and Freedoms:
Sandzak is an underdeveloped region. Novi Pazar is a town of bankrupt factories, insufficient social and health security. There are 20.000 unemployed persons only in the town of Novi Pazar. Thousands of young people have no future, but they are in the claws of drugs, crime and prostitution. The town will get into an even worse situation with the returnees who are arriving and have no help from anywhere. The biggest problem are the children who have better knowledge of the foreign language than their native language.
Roma are in the worst situation. They are nowhere in the census records or civil records, they have no personal documents because they lack residence registration.
Roma - containers settlement, the neighbors' intolerance is very pronounced.
The question she asked was if a problem should be solved only to create more problems. Ministry of Internal Affairs, Zorica Djokic-Milisavljevic
Serbia has signed readmission agreements with 13 countries so far, and we are to sign a joint agreement to include all the EU countries.
Between March 2003 and November 2006:
- 2003: 6.837 requests
- 2004: 5.487 requests
- 2005: 5.960 requests
- 2006: 3.678 requests
- 2007:
Serbia has received a total of 21.962 requests for citizenship confirmation, mostly from Germany (80%):
- Germany: 9.530
- Switzerland: 1.450
- Denmark: 658
- Belgium: 193
- Netherlands: 457
- Italy: 53
- Sweden: 1.407
- Luxembourg: 178
So far 16.820 have been answered positively. Serbia has an obligation to readmit its citizens and these persons can return to Serbia. The number of people returned:
- 2003: 521
- 2004: 4.197
- 2005: 4.353
- 2006: 2.822
63% are women and 37% are men. The Ministry hasn't processed the children.
The cases of around 1.000 persons have been examined because Serbia was their starting point. It was mostly Albanians, Turks, the citizens of Egypt, Moldavia, Bosnia, Ukraine...
She expects bigger problems as of January 2008, because that's when the joint readmission agreement with the EU comes into effect.
Notes made by Marija Simovic |
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