Izbjeglička naselja u Srbiji: Narod koji je preživio
The Refugee Settlements in Serbia: The People Who Survived

Author(s): Bojan Munjin
Subject(s): History, Social Sciences, Sociology, Recent History (1900 till today), Special Historiographies:, Transformation Period (1990 - 2010), Migration Studies, Wars in Jugoslavia
Published by: Srpsko narodno vijeće, Arhiv Srba u Hrvatskoj
Keywords: Serb refugees; operation Storm; refugee settlements in Serbia;
Summary/Abstract: During the last war, in the beginning of the 90s, there were around 400 000 Serbs who escaped Croatian territory and most of them ended in Serbia where they, in smaller or bigger groups, live in metropolitan areas, cities and villages even today. Those smaller groups of mostly compatriots are united by the sad destiny of refugees, solidarity and memory of homeland. Almost a half of this half a million population lives in Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in villages mostly built on their own on empty fields, on the outskirts where initially there were no conditions to develop a civilized lifestyle. Those settlements live as a memory of self-sacrifice of population torn from their root, left with nothing and forced to undertake a precarious road to a new environment. It should be emphasized that most of the refugee settlements in Vojvodina and elsewhere aren't slums or ‘empires of poor’, but solid houses that children leave every day to go to school, their parents to go to work and earn their daily bread and the eldest do their best to help as much as they can. In the moment they were built, those houses witnessed blood, sweat and tears of their household members because suffer and trouble are in common to almost every one of the half a million of Serbs who came to Serbia from Croatia. Psychologically, we can never measure the amount of negative energy accumulated among the Serb refugees from Croatia during the mid-90's which resulted in many diseases, death and existential traumas, however, there was also a strong will to survive; the Serb refugees from Croatia managed to sustain and initiate a new life in Serbia.

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