Promoting Safe and Peaceful Repatriation under the Dayton Agreements

IV. Conclusion.

As has been suggested throughout the foregoing discussion, early return policies could substantially undermine refugees' willingness to participate in elections and their ability to return to their original homes -- the two aspects of the peace plan most likely to support efforts to rebuild an ethnically heterogeneous, tolerant, and peaceful society. In announcing her plans for the repatriation and reintegration of refugees and other displaced people from Bosnia-Herzegovina, the UNHCR cautioned her audience about the threatened Serb exodus from the Sarajevo suburbs, stating "[w]e must not allow ethnic division, so cruelly carried out during the war, to be completed in this time of peace." In the intervening weeks, her worst fears have been realized and the ethnic division of Bosnia-Herzegovina continues. The provisions of the Dayton Agreements relating to refugees' right to return to their home of origin and their right to participate in elections provide an opportunity to stem this tide, but short-sighted western European repatriation policies threaten to squander this opportunity. Unless they take a longer view, these asylum states are likely to rid themselves of the refugee burden in the short-term, only to face another mass influx of asylum-seekers when conflict reignites in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the not-so-distant future.

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