A forty-five minute bus ride from the center of Belgrade brings you to a small suburban neighbourhood called Resnik. From where the bus drops you off at the cross-roads with a few small shops, bakeries, and a newsagent, a further ten minute walk brings you to a piece of land with old and badly constructed buildings, which look more like shacks than proper houses.

These shacks are the informal “collective center” Resnik, which has become a home to around 70 families of “internally displaced persons” (IDPs), who fled Kosovo during the conflict in 1999. Some of these families in Resnik are also so-called “readmisanti” : people who lived in collective centers for 10 years, then left to go to the countries of Western Europe where they sought asylum and were refused, and were then deported, or “readmitted” back to Serbia, following the increased implementation of the Readmission Agreements between Serbia and those countries they were refused asylum in. I visited two families of IDPs from Kosovo, who were deported from Norway : a family of two sisters A. and L., both single mothers, who are raising their children together, and a young married couple T. and N. with two small children. They told me about their life in Serbia before they decided to “try their chance” in Norway, about life there, the deportation itself and their life afterwards.

Collective Centers

When I visited Resnik, there was about half a meter of snow covering the ground and children with running noses between 3 and 13 were playing in the snow. Adults, those with a cold, and pensive adolescent girls were inside : sitting next to electric heaters which heat 24/7 the small rooms with badly insulated thin walls and single-glazed windows, covered with curtains. Each family has a room or two, with kitchen facilities, but without a bathroom : there are a few run down and unsanitary toilets and showers for the whole center. Some families that could afford such an investment have built their own toilet and a provisional shower, adjoining their sleeping rooms.

Even though it was still light outside, the rooms were lit with an electric light and the curtains were keeping the heat in : the electricity, whenever it was not turned off for an unpredictable period of time, cost them a flat-rate of 1000 dinars (10 euros) monthly. This is perhaps part of the reason the television was on all the time.

Collective centers were created all over the territory of ex-Yugoslavia during the nineties, to accommodate people fleeing areas of armed conflict. They were first opened for the refugees from Croatia and Bosnia in the early nineties and in 1996 there were around 700 centers in Serbia alone. After 1999, they also served to accommodate the IDPs from Kosovo and in 2002, there were 388 centers around Serbia. There has been a great pressure to close down the collective centers. As of October 2011, there are 28 centers in Serbia (excluding Kosovo and Metohija), according to the Commissariat for Refugees of the Republic of Serbia. [1]

This data only includes formal collective centers – but there is a number of “informal” collective centers and Resnik is one of them. This means that the government does not recognize it as an official center and does not contribute to its running and up-keep. Most informal collective centers are ex-formal collective centers, from which people decided not to move when they were declared “closed”. Some are in fact just unregistered buildings refugees in housing need moved into.

Life in a Collective Center

The two families I have spoken to decided to leave Resnik and Serbia, where they lived ever since they fled Kosovo in 1999, because of similar reasons. They could barely make the ends meet every month and they had no prospects for the future : they knew that the black market jobs, the only ones they were able to get, would not bring them enough money to move somewhere where they needed to pay rent. They also had no security : if the young father N., on whom the whole family depended, had an accident at his heavy-going construction site job, there would be no compensation from the employer and the whole family would lose their source of income.

Refugees from Kosovo are also a target of prejudice and discrimination, even the ethnic Serbs. I was shocked when the otherwise very kind lady that lives across from my apartment in Belgrade commented on my telling her I spent my day with “IDPs” from Kosovo by saying : “those people are not real Serbians, they have been Kosovized (“pokosovarili su se !”) – and it is a shame our country is spending all that money on them, when our people too live in poverty !”. I did not know what money she was talking about, for as far as I was told in Resnik, support from the government is scarce and limited to the past-sell-by-date ketch-up and the like.

Going to Norway thus seemed appealing : especially as some people they knew went there and were granted asylum – and, as A. asks me with a provoking smile, why not try your luck in the best of all countries, the richest of all countries ?

Norway, Normal Life

Four and a half years ago the two sisters A. and L., decided to go to Norway with their children, after A.’s husband died of cancer. A. is shivering when she describes the anguish she felt when she risked everything by going across the whole Europe with three small children, her sister and niece – they had to cross borders illegally, because until 2009 residents of Serbia still needed a visa to enter the Schengen area. But it was definitely the right decision : she told me that she would do it again a hundred times, if only it would mean that her children would have a normal life.

This is what Norway represented for her : normal life. From start to end – from a description of how it was when they found a police station in Norway to register their asylum claim, to the description of how accommodating her boss was when they had to deliver her pay earlier, due to the immanent deportation – she talks in superlatives about Norway. As her sister L. says, though she was always a proud Serbian patriot, she would happily never return to Serbia if another country offered her the possibility, like Norway has, to have a normal life. Normal life.

When I asked her what that meant, she told me that, once they were put in the asylum seekers’ accommodation in the city on the very north of Norway, for the first week or so, they could not get the kids out of the bathroom. They were playing in the bathtub for hours — this was the first time that their children, the oldest of which was almost 10, ever lived in a place with a bathroom. For L., this was normal life : having a bathroom. But also it meant that she had a job, her children went to school and after school activities (martial arts, swimming), which they could never afford in Serbia. They had enough food and warm clothes.

Stress was of course part of this normal life – stress that they will get a negative reply to their asylum claim, that they will have to return back to their old lives, that they will deported them “from the fairy-tale, back to a horror film”, as L. says. But this stress was lesser than the every-day stress of trying to make the ends meet they were experiencing in Serbia. So they went on, for almost three years.

Deportation ?

They got the first negative response to their asylum claim, after about a year and a half – and they became more concerned. But as they were extremely well integrated in their small town community, they believed everything was going to be alright. Especially as there were also families who got granted asylum. They appealed the first decision and waited for the answer.

And then the first mass deportations started. In 2009, Norway signed the readmission agreement with Serbia, which allowed the deportation of everyone, whose final asylum claim was refused or was residing in Norway without a permit of residence [2] – and this meant that if the appeals to the negative response to their asylum claim were refused, A. and L. with their families would be deported.

The Serbian community in Norway was very well connected. They knew each other from various reception centers they initially stayed in, and kept contact when families were dispersed around the country. They communicated regularly and news spread quickly. “They were after every single one of us who got a negative [response to the asylum claim], the rumour was they will deport everyone – if it is not your turn this time, it will be in week or a month,” explained T., a young wife of N., whose family also got their first “negative” after a year and a half.

The two families stayed in Norway just under three years. They told me that some people, knowing that the deportation was immanent, decided to hide and “go illegal” in order to stay in Norway. For them this was not a viable option – this would stop being normal life.

For them the decision was whether to opt for IOM’s not-at-all-voluntary “assisted voluntary return” [3]. T. and N., after a long deliberation, ended up being returned “voluntarily”. The advantage of this was they did not get a two year prohibition to enter the Schengen are and they also received a 100 euros per child and 200 euros per adult when they arrived to Serbia. But A. and L. did not want to take this option – they hoped until the very end that they might not be deported.

Deportation !

The deportations started with a dawn raid : in the early hours of the morning, those who managed to sleep despite the stress of a pending deportation were woken up by a group of policemen who had a key to their apartment. They were given half an hour to pack three years of their life.

A. and L. said they and their children were crying the whole way to the airport and on the plane as well. L. said leaving Norway was more traumatic than leaving Kosovo more than 10 years earlier. When she was leaving her home town in which she grew up and lived happily until the war, she knew that she had to leave – to save her life. But it was impossible for her to explain to herself why she had to leave Norway. She was a respected member of the community, had a job and took good care of her children – most importantly, she was happy and there was no threat for her or others if she stayed in the city that was her home for three years. Yet she was summoned early and the morning and made to leave.

Arriving Back to Serbia

For N. and T. the deportation was not nearly as traumatic, as was the first morning when they woke up in Serbia. Late at night, they arrived to the “Office for Readmission on the Airport Nikola Tesla” in Belgrade, were greeted by the rude Serbian officials who had no understanding for the psychological state the “returnees” they were supposed to provide a service for were finding themselves in, let alone pointed them to any support that is cited in the Information Booklet for Returnees [4]. From the airport, they went straight to T.’s parents. They were happy to be with their family again and for their youngest child who was born in Norway to meet her grandparents. But the next morning when they woke up to the reality of life in Serbia, the despair kicked in. T. told me of an acquaintance of hers who committed suicide a few days after her return to Serbia.

But the Serbian media is silent about the issue of returnees from Western Europe. When the two families, together with hundreds others, were deported from Norway, there were rumours among them that the government has received funds for helping returnees to start a life in Serbia upon their return. Because no one received any help or support, they wanted to know where this money went. They wanted to contact the media to publish their story. But when T. contacted an acquaintance who works for a Belgrade newspaper, she was told the newspaper would not publish the story and that the journalist risks losing her job if she does try to push for it.

Life in a Collective Center, Again

A year an a half since they have been returned, the two families live a life very similar to the life they led before they left to Norway : in the very same collective center, with the same every day stress, precarious black market jobs and precarious future prospects.

Yet L. stresses that, besides the trauma of having to leave her normal life in Norway, the everyday problems she faces in Serbia are not specific to her, but are shared by a large percentage of the population. 700 000 Serbians live below poverty line, with less than 80 euros monthly [5]. Corruption and unemployment [6] contribute to an ever growing difference between the rich and the poor. This affects above all minority populations, such as the Roma, and among them especially women – around 87.1% of Roma women only received elementary school education [7]. L. and A.’s issues blend in well with the general Serbian landscape of problems.

But even though they feel despair on a daily basis, they don’t cry in front of their friends, they joke and laugh and keep fighting. For them it is important to always wear make-up and take time to do their hair in the morning. Some people tell them that they are strong women – but for them being this way is the only way to survive.