In Bosnian Housing Wars, the Well-Connected Win

As star anchor on Sarajevo’s state television, Senad Hadzifejzovic figures he deserves certain perks. Throughout the war here, he dutifully relayed the government’s message on the nightly news to a terrified population. And now he is host of an important news talk show, “Face to Face,” a position that demands privilege.

Among his rewards is a new place to live--an apartment overlooking the central downtown park. That apartment, however, belongs to Mirjana Babic-Papo, an elderly Jewish woman who wants to come home. She is out of luck.

Hadzifejzovic is one of a growing number among the capital’s elite whom the Muslim-led government has awarded with apartments claimed by other people, usually members of some minority.

The story of owners struggling against all odds to regain apartments and homes occupied by other people during the war is not a new one in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Sarajevo government has blamed the problem on the need to give housing to refugees after a 3 1/2-year war that drove hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.

But many apartments have been given not to refugees but to senior government officials, leaders of the ruling Muslim nationalist party, prominent state security agents and darlings of the regime such as Hadzifejzovic.

In addition to the news anchor, according to human rights investigators and local news reports, homes have been taken by, among others: Rasim Kadic, the Muslim-Croat Federation minister for refugees; Kemal Muftic, a key advisor to President Alija Izetbegovic; the former mayor of Sarajevo; the head of the city housing commission and his secretary; and a leading Islamic cleric.

“It is one huge robbery,” said Branka Raguz, a judge who serves as one of the national government’s three ombudsmen. “In Bosnia-Herzegovina, property rights are the least protected of any human rights.”

The Sarajevo government has ignored the criticisms about the distribution of housing, and officials say they are acting within their laws.

Most of those who have lost houses and apartments are Serbs, Croats, Jews and other non-Muslims, many of whom left during the war but want to return. Officially, the government welcomes minorities as confirmation of the capital’s tradition of tolerance and diversity.

But the reality is different. Human rights officials and leaders of Sarajevo’s dwindling minority communities see the housing grab as a subtle brand of “ethnic cleansing,” the wartime practice of using killing and intimidation to eject ethnic enemies.

“The authorities are abusing the law to maintain ‘ethnically clean’ areas,” Raguz said. Her office handled nearly 30,000 property claims last year--the overwhelming bulk of its caseload--and is receiving as many as 40 new complaints a day nationwide.

Up to 40% of apartments and residential buildings in Sarajevo are occupied illegitimately, she said.

Babic-Papo, who is 75 and survived a World War II concentration camp, is among 147 Jewish families who are trying to recover homes that were taken by the government. The families, part of Sarajevo’s small but centuries-old Jewish community, left the city at the start of the war, in 1992, after signing agreements with city officials.

Under those agreements, the city was to temporarily be responsible for the homes until the Jews returned. But many of the apartments were awarded to powerful people, and not one of the agreements has been honored, Jewish leaders and human rights officials say.

“She has been through everything--two wars, a concentration camp and now this,” said Babic-Papo’s daughter, who did not want her name published for fear of reprisals. “She is completely losing hope.”

The Jews, while especially well organized in the housing dispute, represent only a tiny portion of the victims. Most are Serbs and Croats, but many are Muslims with little political clout.

Mira Cokorilo, an architect, lived with her Serbian father and Croatian mother in a grand second-floor apartment on a tree-lined central Sarajevo plaza for more than four decades. After her parents’ deaths, the apartment was put in Cokorilo’s name. But she was out of the country for medical treatment when the war started, she says, and she did not return to Sarajevo until last year.

A relative who was tending to the apartment was expelled, and when Cokorilo returned she found that Izetbegovic advisor Muftic, who also runs the government news service, had moved in with his wife and was refusing to leave. Muftic offered to help her find a smaller place, Cokorilo says, but then later threatened to dump her possessions in the garbage.

“I feel humiliated as a human being and deprived as a citizen,” Cokorilo wrote in one of three letters begging for help from Carl Bildt, the former head of civilian peacekeeping in Bosnia. She says she never received a response.

The Cokorilo family had invested nearly $50,000 in the apartment since moving there in 1951, she says. She carries folders full of receipts for plumbing and electrical wiring and new hardwood flooring as proof of those expenses. And she carries a yellowing, taped-together architect’s floor plan of the four-bedroom flat, huge and elegant by Balkan standards.

“If the walls could talk, they would tell such beautiful stories of our family and friends,” said Cokorilo, 52. She hired a lawyer and is fighting to regain the apartment.

But a Housing Ministry judgment May 28 said that she had lost her right to the apartment by having “abandoned” it. She was given 15 days to appeal--but the judgment was not delivered to her attorney until June 26, two weeks past the deadline.

“I really do not know what to do now,” she said, shaking her head during an interview. She stays with friends while in Sarajevo to press her case, which is made all the worse, she contends, because Muftic already has another, if less luxurious, residence.

Muftic, in a brief telephone interview, said he had done nothing wrong because the apartment officially belongs to the state, not to an individual.

Technically, he is correct. As part of Bosnia’s Communist legacy, most apartments before the war were state-owned, with longtime residents such as the Cokorilo family granted “occupancy rights”--a status less than full ownership but greater than tenancy and that could be passed on to heirs. Such laws governing real estate complicate housing disputes in Bosnia and throughout the former Yugoslav federation.

With the war, the government in Sarajevo (as well as in the Serb-controlled half of the fragmented country) adopted harsh legislation to declare apartments abandoned if the residents were not present, even momentarily. After the war, the government allowed residents to reclaim their homes, but within deadlines that human rights advocates said were impossible to meet.

Despite promises to the contrary, the government has not changed the law. And even those who meet the law’s tough conditions run into an obstacle course of needless red tape, malicious bureaucrats and hostile police and courts that blocks success.

“There is simply no political will to correct this,” Raguz said. “There is no functioning state, no functioning political system, no rule of law. It’s a dirty picture.”