CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: THE REFUGEES;
For Kosovars, Losing Homes Means Losing All Wealth
By John Kifner


In this region of Europe, making policy by shifting populations has a long tradition.

The forces of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia seem to be keeping to that tradition, stripping Kosovo's ethnic Albanians of the farms and houses that are their only source of wealth, and then reportedly taking identity documents, property deeds and car license plates — everything that would prove they ever lived in the southern Serbian province.

The Serbian strategy of driving the ethnic Albanians out without documents makes it difficult for them not only to prove that they ever lived there, but also to be integrated into the more regulated societies of other European countries, if they cannot or will not eventually return home.

Thus, by burning the houses, the Serbs are wiping out everything the ethnic Albanians have accumulated over generations. "Fifty years of work, from the father to the son, and now everything is gone," said Osman Osman, 44...

Adapted from The New York Times, April 4, 1999


Lifetime of War for Kosovar Refugee
By Greg Myre


KUKES, Albania (AP) Zeqir Berisha's long life sounds profoundly simple: he's worked the same farm and lived in the same whitewashed house for all his 87 years.

Yet the ceaseless Balkan feuds have turned the stooped, toothless Kosovar into a refugee, robbed him of his possessions and kept him at the crossroads of the some of the 20th century's nastiest wars...

Berisha had never been driven from his farmhouse until Serb troops came knocking on his door on the morning of May 6. The soldiers told the family to leave immediately, and they did on the two day journey to the Albanian border, they were stopped repeatedly by Serb forces, and forced to hand over all their money. The final insult came with they reached the mountain border crossing, and were stripped of all identity documents.

"They took everything," said Berisha, opening his empty wallet as evidence.

Adapted from The Associated Press, NY May 17, 1999


These reported incidents are but two of many accounts to come out of the chaos and strife of the conflicts in the area once known as Yugoslavia. The historical and political nature of these events are all too prominent a part of our lives, and forms of this torture and denial of identity are neither new or unique to the Yugoslavian territory. What appears to make these examples more pronounced than ever before is the fact that the world has begun to awaken to the moral and ethical values involved in such atrocities, and have decided to take action about them; wars are no longer fought over territory, or familial rivalry, or ideological conflicts; what appears to be new is the intensity of the world's reaction to the horrifying nature of the persecution involved: the Kosovan example is, perhaps, the most blatant and obvious case of human atrocity and identity denial. The forced and brutal nature of the stripping of citizenship and identity results in a condition of statelessness—isolation from one's true national base, and the attempt to erase all evidence of existence. What is this thing: statelessness? Let's examine it, and the example of the former Yugoslavia and its conflict with the Kosovars. Don Bragaw, guest editor


Statelessness and Citizenship


The Universal Declaration of Human Rights unequivocally states that "everyone has the right to a nationality" and that "no-one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality." But many thousands of people across the globe lack the security and protection which citizenship can provide.

A substantial proportion of the world's stateless people are also victims of forced displacement. In some instances, individuals and communities are deprived of their nationality by governmental decree and are subsequently expelled from the country which they consider to be their home. In other situations, stateless people are obliged to flee because of the persecution and discrimination which they experience. And having left the country where they have lived for most or all their lives, stateless people may subsequently find it impossible to return.

Statelessness is not only a source of human insecurity and a cause of forced displacement, but may also pose a threat to national and regional stability. Citizenship disputes have become an important feature of the contemporary world, generating tension and even violence between different states and communities. Humanitarian organizations have a valuable role to play in averting such situations, protecting stateless people and finding just solutions to their plight. Ultimately, however, the problems of statelessness and disputed nationality can only be effectively addressed through the actions of states themselves.


Nationality and Citizenship


Citizenship is a fundamental element of human security. As well as providing people with a sense of belonging and identity, it entitles the individual to the protection of the state and provides a legal basis for the exercise of many civil and political rights. People who lack a nationality may find it difficult or impossible to engage in a range of activities that citizens take for granted. If an individual is to enjoy the automatic right of residence in a country, carry a passport and benefit from diplomatic protection while abroad, then citizenship is indispensable. In many situations, nationality also enables people to find employment, to make use of public services, to participate in the political process and to have access to the judicial system. (The terms citizenship and nationality are used here as synonyms.)

Nationality is not granted indiscriminately, but is generally based upon factors such as a person's place of birth, parentage, or the relationship they have established with a state through long-term residence there. In legal terms, such ties provide the 'genuine effective link' between the individual and the state. For the vast majority of people around the world, that link is easily established and readily acknowledged by the authorities of the state concerned. In situations where these conditions do not pertain, however, problems of statelessness are likely to emerge.

Under international law, a stateless person is one "who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law." (Article 1, 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons). This definition is helpfully concise and to the point. But it is also a very limited and somewhat legalistic definition, referring to a specific group of people known as de jure stateless persons. It does not encompass the many people, usually described as de facto stateless persons, who are unable to establish their nationality or whose citizenship is disputed by one or more countries. The notion of statelessness in its broader sense, to denote all those people who lack what has become known as an 'effective nationality,' and who are consequently unable to enjoy the rights that are associated with citizenship. (For a fuller discussion of the legal dimensions of statelessness, see C. Batchelor, 'Stateless persons: some gaps in international protection,' International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 7, no. 2, 1995.)

Statelessness, whether of the de jure or de facto variety, has many causes. An individual may lose his or her nationality and fail to acquire a new one as a result of an extended stay abroad or through marriage to (and subsequent divorce from) a person of a different nationality – a problem which affects a disproportionate number of women. Although it is the fundamental right of every child to acquire a nationality, children who are born to stateless parents or refugees – or who are born out of wedlock – may be denied citizenship.

Individuals may also find themselves stateless because of faulty administrative practices, the failure or refusal of a state to ensure the registration of births, or because of conflicts in the nationality laws of different countries, particularly when one adheres to the principle of jus sanguinis (citizenship on the basis of descent) and the other adheres to the principle of jus soli (citizenship on the basis of the place of birth). Finally, a person may voluntarily renounce their nationality and fail to acquire a new citizenship before that renunciation takes effect. In recent years it has also been known for asylum seekers to become or remain stateless by choice, so as to enhance their prospects for admission to one of the more prosperous countries.

Situations of statelessness involving larger numbers of people tend to arise in a number of different circumstances. Governments may amend their citizenship laws and denationalize whole sections of society in order to punish or marginalize them or to facilitate their exclusion from the state's territory. The formation of new states, resulting from decolonization or the disintegration of a federal polity, may leave thousands or even millions of people stateless or with a disputed claim to citizenship. Large-scale statelessness may also arise in the context of mass expulsions and refugee movements, especially when the population concerned has lived in exile for many years without acquiring the citizenship of their asylum country.


The Revival of International Interest


During the cold war- a period of relative stability in the configuration of states- the problem of statelessness was generally regarded as a minor one, affecting just a small number of people who fell into the interstices of the international system. As a result, the issue failed to attract a significant amount of attention from governments or humanitarian organizations.

International conventions on statelessness were established in 1954 and 1961, but, for reasons that will be explained later, few countries chose to accede to these legal instru ments. In 1975, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was entrusted with certain responsibilities in relation to stateless people. For the next 15 years, however, the organization devoted relatively little time, effort or resources to this element of its mandate.

Commenting upon this situation in 1988, the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues (a body co-founded by a former UN High Commissioner for Refugees) observed that "UNHCR has remained somewhat indifferent when it comes to the fate of the stateless. The term 'stateless person' hardly ever appears in UNHCR publications – a fact which, together with the doctrinal vacuum in this particular area, only serves to heighten a general indifference towards a problem which should rather inspire in human terms the same compassion as that shown to refugees." (Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, Winning the Human Race, Zed Books, London, 1988, p. 112.)

Since that comment was made, the problem of statelessness has forced its way onto the international humanitarian and security agenda as a result of several related factors: the rise of ethnic consciousness in certain parts of the world; the increased incidence of communal conflict; the associated disintegration of several federal polities; the fear of large-scale population movements involving stateless people; and the tightening of immigration controls throughout most of the industrialized world.

At the same time, the international community's changing approach to the problem of forced displacement has prompted UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations to address the issue of statelessness in a more urgent and systematic manner. Three specific trends have contributed to this outcome: the new emphasis which is being placed on human rights in countries of origin and the prevention of mass exoduses; the growing recognition that countries of origin must play a primary role in averting and resolving situations of forced displacement; and the somewhat belated recognition that voluntary repatriation is in most instances the most appropriate solution to refugee problems. As a UNHCR staff member has observed, had voluntary repatriation been more actively promoted in earlier years, then the organization "would have been required to concentrate on nationality and citizenship issues much sooner, as a key element in the repatriation of stateless refugees." (K. Landgren, 'Foreword', Refugee Survey Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 3, 1995, p. viii.)


Former Yugoslavia


The significance and complexity of the citizenship issue in former Yugoslavia derives from three related phenomena: the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) at the beginning of the 1990s; the subsequent armed conflicts which occurred within and between the successor states; and the displacement of around four million people, both within and beyond the borders of former Yugoslavia, as a result of those wars. In the legal regime of the SFRY, every Yugoslav citizen possessed both federal citizenship and internal citizenship of one of the six republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. But the latter form of citizenship had few practical implications. All citizens of the SFRY, irrespective of their republican nationality, enjoyed the same rights and were free to live and work on any part of the federal territory. As all citizens of the SFRY held a republican citizenship at the time when the country disintegrated, and as the citizenship laws of the successor states all enshrined the principle of legal continuity, de jure statelessness has in general been avoided. In states which were affected by armed conflict, however, most notably Bosnia and Croatia, some people found themselves without a nationality because they could not prove their former republican citizenship and because municipal birth and nationality registers had disappeared or been destroyed.

While de jure statelessness may not have been a great problem, the application of the principle of legal continuity threatened to create a problem of de facto statelessness for the hundreds of thousands of people who were living outside of the republic of which they were now citizens. In short, they were at risk of becoming foreigners in their usual place of residence. Some successor states, such as Bosnia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) have taken steps to facilitate the naturalization of people who were living on their territory at the time of independence. However, many citizens of the former SFRY, particularly those in Croatia and Macedonia, as well as those who had fled abroad, have not been able to obtain an effective nationality. (The full name of the republic is the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.)

In 1995, a UNHCR publication reported that the citizenship problems of former Yugoslavia were political as well as legal in nature. "The main problem," it stated, "is that some of the newly established states have, by means of various legal devices, attempted to exclude from their nationality or at least delay the acquisition of their nationality by persons who have been residing in their territory for considerable lengths of time. Such cases have invariably involved persons belonging to an ethnic minority which is perceived as 'undesirable' from the point of view of the majority's nationalist faction." (J. Pejic, 'Citizenship and statelessness in the former Yugoslavia: the legal framework', Refugee Survey Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 3, 1995, p. 8.)

With the mutual recognition of the successor states and the signing of the Dayton accords (which include inter alia the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness) a basis has been established for the resolution of the citizenship issue. In addition, a number of expert meetings on citizenship legislation have been held, enabling the Council of Europe and UNHCR to develop a set of recommendations that will allow the states concerned to address the problem of statelessness and to promote the right to an effective nationality for all former SFRY citizens. Even so, organizations such as the Open Society Institute have continued to express disquiet about this issue, especially its impact on already disadvantaged groups, such as ethnically mixed families, migrants, refugees and the Roma. (Forced Migration Monitor, September 1996)


Adapted from United Nations High Commission on Refugees. "The State of the World''s Refugees: A Humanitarian Agenda." http://www.unhcr.ch/refworld/pub/state/97/ch6.htm (17 May 1999). The complete essay covers other worldwide examples of the impact of statelessness.

Don Bragaw is professor emeritus of East Carolina University in Greenville, NC.