"Refugees have been manipulated like no other population in recent times. Perhaps only the mentally ill were manipulated that way in the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign of terror."
She was born in Zagreb, educated in Šibenik, and then studied in Zagreb, where she received her master's degree and doctorate. Sanda Rašković has been working in Belgrade at the "Laza Lazarević" hospital for ten years. She dealt with post-traumatic stress, the problem of raped women, and then the problem of the family. She started her family here, with Aleksandar Ivić, with whom she has three children.
When she arrived at the Commissariat, which had been moved to the Red Cross building since the bombing, she found "some very good and hard-working people who know how to do their job well." She also found some services that are now "combing here, from the service for economic crime, through the financial inspection to the service for payment transactions, which will help us arrive at a relatively clean situation". She refused to meet with the previous commissioner Bratislav Morin.
With her arrival, the way the Commissariat is financed will fundamentally change.
"Until now, the Commissariat was an institution that was financed from the budget and from grants from the High Commissioner for Refugees. Due to the sanctions and political attitudes that were as they were, the Commissariat had no access to the diaspora, business lobbies around the world, or non-governmental organizations that worked within the European Union, which are serious and can be serious donors and bearers of important programs and ideas," Sanda Rašković, the new Commissioner for Refugees of the Republic of Serbia, told Vreme.
What will Commissariat download na sebe?
The Commissariat should become a coordinating institution that will improve relations with the refugee corps, which is large, and do so through refugee associations and their representatives. According to the old census, we have somewhere around 580.000 refugees, 85 percent of whom pay for an apartment privately or live with families and relatives. They take care of themselves, engage in the gray economy, work in very unfavorable conditions for private companies, and only five percent of that population has solved the housing issue and has a chance for some kind of decent life. We will reach those refugees of ours through the association, and those in the camps, which are 15 percent, through commissioners on the ground, so we will find out what they want for the entire population. When we know what they want and have this positive data, we will work with them to resolve specific issues, in cooperation with UNHCR, non-governmental organizations, business lobbies, and the Serbian diaspora.
Independent od budget, you can biti i abandoned od States. Exists li ta danger?
It is planned to develop a state program for solving the refugee issue. At this moment, it is impossible to create that program because we do not have a defined country. In a few months, things will change, so it will be possible to create a program for refugees. First of all, the problem must be politically defined and the state must have a clear position - whether it wants these people or not. I believe that they want them, and I will advocate for it, and all the indications are that they are now seriously dealing with that issue for the first time. President Kostunica has appointed an advisor for refugees, and everything coming from their side seems very serious. The political part must also be solved through tripartite and bilateral agreements, because all the states within the former SFRY have refugees, and the problem of repatriation must certainly be solved that way. Without that political part, there is no legal part either, because the legal part is only the implementation of political talks. The third part is certainly the economic part and will be carried out in projects for a specific target population.
We are a poor country and we cannot solve the refugee problem alone, that's why donors are necessary. When the country is grappling with the problems it inherited from the war and sanctions, it takes a lot of hope and will to deal with everything. The budget is by no means sufficient. A million dollars a month is needed just for the maintenance of collective centers in Serbia.
What specifically you can da offer?
We need to know exactly how many doctors, bakers, pharmacists we have, where they want to stay, how they want to solve their housing issue. It can be building houses, perhaps investing in abandoned properties that they could appropriate, buy back after a certain number of years. These can also be projects for the construction of settlements and, for example, ecological factories that will be financed by other countries and that will find their economic interest there. Canada has created an investment program in the Balkan countries, a large part of which is planned for Serbia. One part of that investment will be profitable, and the largest part will be humanitarian. When people are provided with the right to work and housing, then infrastructure is included in it - kindergarten, clinic, school, so various professions can find their place there. Of course, this also opens up a place for the domicile population, who can also find employment there. We are planning a serious approach and many projects modeled on Western ones, written in their language, right down to the number. The commissariat will be an institution that will mediate in a sisterly and coordinating manner between the refugee corps and the implementers of all those programs. This is exactly why the census of refugees that is being done right now is very important. Due to the fact that the federal and republican elections were not held at the same time, and that there was an interregnum in which there were various obstructions, we could not immediately deal with the proper preparation of the census. The census is very important to us because it will provide us with realistic information about how many people we have and what those people want.
U what kind je real condition refugee population?
Two feelings dominate the refugee corps. One is anxiety and fear, because that population was manipulated a lot, it can be said like no other population in recent times, maybe that's how the mentally ill were manipulated in the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign of terror. People are afraid that they will be mobilized, that they will be moved like some kind of passive meat. I have to emphasize that this will not happen again and I am sure that the people who are in power now have no idea about it, and I will be there to prevent anyone who wants to do so.
Another feeling, even more important, is apathy, which is huge and justified - we are being counted again, and nothing will happen. I am sure that something good and concrete will be done this time. The census is the first step on a great journey, and I again appeal to refugees to come forward, both those with citizenship and TE ID card, and only with refugee status or without it, that is, everyone who can prove that they came during this ten-year war from the former YU republics for any reason, those who took refuge here from war or any other danger.
How will flow integration refugee u Serbia?
We do not want to ghettoize refugees. After all, there are many who came and found their love here, got married, got married. I myself married a man who is from Belgrade. Admittedly, I never had refugee status, I came from Croatia in 91 because I got a service, but probably, like most who came after so many years, I got involved in the threads of this country. As a neuropsychiatrist, I worked with groups of refugees; I've seen that people don't progress at all because they keep repeating the same things. Then I introduced the resident population into the same groups and they all progressed, only when they mixed. At first it was difficult, but then much better, because both of them saw that human problems are essential problems, receiving and giving love, adaptations - the same.
You believe da set does not have ghettoization?
I personally have never had any problems with Serbians. While I was working as a volunteer in the field, I had the opportunity to see people who both accepted and helped refugees. The people themselves are impoverished, annoyed by the policies that have been pursued, they had to find a scapegoat. It's nothing new, it's a biblical thing. For many, refugees have become a disruptive factor. There was a lot of waving at the beginning - refugees have priority in employment, refugees this, or that. Secondly, the war was ongoing and it was often heard - I don't want my son to die next to so many deserters. Today, things have not progressed yet, but as we progress more economically, people will have more energy to be noble. There is not much nobility in the camps, only the most essentially noble are noble even in the camps. There are well-known images from there when a mother takes a piece of bread and eats it, but does not give it to her child. When economic prosperity begins, Serbians will treat refugees differently in a psychological sense. I think that the ugly things that happened to refugees, exiles and displaced persons are not related to the bad characteristics of our people. Serbian people are not xenophobic. The problem of non-acceptance is related to the general misery that the people fell into, and a culprit was needed - because of them we are waging a war, because of them we have no money, we have sanctions...
How se taj the culprit feels?
It feels terrible. What I will try to do now, first of all as a neuropsychiatrist, is to fight against the division between refugees and natives, between Serbs and Serbians, between those from Dalmatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. I see problems between Serbs from Kosovo and Serbs from Krajina in the refugee camps. We must not allow that. Differences are our strengths. The fact that we grew up under the influence of different cultures should be our wealth and value, something that we will give to each other. That maneuver towards the refugees, that search for the culprit in them is a purely psychological thing, it is the most common but also the most primitive defense system.
How "the culprit" rid burden guilt which pod by pressing feels?
He should be told and constantly repeated to him that he is not guilty, to be repeated many times by people from the establishment. First of all, it should be told to him by me, as his commissioner, and then by people from the top of the state. The domicile environment in which he lives should tell him the same. We all need to look a little behind that stall of ours, to look from another angle, the other side.
About Jovan Rašković
I don't want it to turn out that after the battle everyone is a general, but my father was a general before the battle. He warned of the danger of the war policy led by Slobodan Milošević. He always believed that Knin was not Serbia nor could it be Serbia, but he believed that Serbs in Croatia should have a high degree of autonomy and all their personal and national rights. If my father's politics had been understood in the right way, among Croatian but even more among Serbian politicians, I am sure that we would not have these 180.000 people who came from Krajina. If the political trend to which my father belonged was supported, I believe that the post of Commissioner for Refugees would not even have to exist.
Who is what?
When I say refugees, I mean not only refugees from BiH, Croatia, Krajina, but also people who fled from Kosovo. They are called displaced persons, which I find extremely administrative. Essentially, they are refugees, they don't have their own house, their own job, their own environment, and they are psychologically and economically in exactly the same situation as the others.
Arrests out of the blue, banishment from the country, beatings... All this happened to us in the last week alone. The Serbian Progressive Party, born from the foam left behind by their spiritual father Vojislav Šešelj, is returning to its roots. I can't escape from myself
"The levers of power are not in their hands," said Bishop Grigorije. "But there is something in the Holy Scriptures that I like very much, and that is that the power of God is revealed in weakness. So, all worldly power is on one side. And on the other side, in the hands of these young men and women is the weakness of this world. But in their weakness, the power of God or God's justice appears. That is why they are at such a great advantage."
The regime and its media have been trumpeting the "civil war" for months, and the government is the only one that has a patent for peace and stability - of course, with the help of the propaganda machine and the use of force. "It is a propaganda tactic of SNS that says: 'violence is everywhere, terrorists surround us, but we are here to save you,'" explains communication professor Jelena Kleut for "Vreme".
Students and citizens who accompany them on these walking feats, were welcomed as the most native together with those who came the day before from other places. A dove of peace was also released on the stage next to the promenade along the river - this symbolic gesture of the two students is the most impressive gesture of understanding and respect between the Bosniak and Serbian peoples since the end of the wars in the former Yugoslavia
The three-day parliament for the promotion of Aleksandar Vučić and his Movement for the People and the State was realistically a fiasco. But it was first of all conceived as a media spectacle for regime television directed by court promoter Željko "DJ Žeks" Mitrović, with scenography and iconography adapted to the Serbian political market.
Anyone who condemns the regime's targeting of people from the media, the non-governmental sector, the opposition and universities, must not agree to this targeting of RTS editors and journalists either.
The government of Đur Mazut is "counter-revolutionary", focused on retaliation and state and street violence against opponents of the regime
Depriving Dejan Ilić, an intellectual with an impeccable life and work biography, of his freedom, without the slightest meaningful reason, is just one of the brutal indicators that the regime has turned against its own citizens and is entering a phase of terror
Vučić and Šešelj: Where I stopped, you continue
The return of radical violence subscribeThe archive of the weekly Vreme includes all our digital editions, since the very beginning of our work. All issues can be downloaded in PDF format, by purchasing the digital edition, or you can read all available texts from the selected issue.
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