A country once emptied by war now faces a peacetime exodus
When the Bosnian sheep farmer fled his home in the disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1992 and went on a forty-day hike with his family to escape the outbreak of a war that would pit neighboring countries against each other, the village he left behind had more than four hundred inhabitants. two shops and a school.
More than half the villagers were fellow Muslims, the rest Serbs, but no one, he said, paid much attention until extremist politicians started baying for blood.
After more than a decade away from his home in eastern Bosnia, the farmer, Fikret Puhalo, 61, returned to his village of Socice. By then there were about a hundred people there, Serbs who had stayed the whole time and a few Muslims who had decided it was safe to go back.
Today only 15 remain. The shops are gone, the school too.
“All the others died or moved away,” Mr. Puhalo said, pointing to empty houses scattered across the rocky hills around the family land where he grazes his sheep. “Not a single child has been born here since I returned,” he said.
The decline of Socice reflects a global phenomenon in which poor agricultural areas lose people to urban centers. It is also part of a serious demographic crisis affecting large parts of Eastern and Central Europe, including relatively prosperous countries such as Poland and Hungary, as low birth rates and emigration reduce the number of people – and fuel ethnonationalist politicians who cry out against the dilution . even the extinction of native populations.
In countries like Hungary, nationalists, who warn that their own population is at risk of disappearing and being replaced by outsiders, have spoken out against immigrants despite severe labor shortages. They have also promoted largely useless state-funded programs aimed at encouraging local women to have more children.
However, nowhere are the demographics and politics surrounding them more fraught than in Bosnia, a small, ethnically divided nation. Like many poorer countries, the country has a high emigration rate, which increased dramatically during the 1992-1995 war. But the country also has an extremely low birth rate, a phenomenon usually associated with richer countries.
In Socice the population has shrunk more sharply in the past twenty years, which have been entirely peaceful, than during the war in Bosnia.
In a cemetery near the village mosque, rebuilt from ruins left by the war, on a sand hill lies the body of Faris Suljanic, who emigrated to Austria for work, where he died at the age of 27 in a traffic accident in 2021.
Down a dirt road from Mr. Puhalo’s land lies the abandoned house of Veljko Samardzija, who died unmarried several years ago, leaving the house strewn with his few possessions: a dog-eared Yugoslavian passport, faded family photos, a small refrigerator and a large Suitcase. television set. Mr Samardzija’s two cousins died in a nearby house, also unmarried and childless.
Bosnia’s fertility rate – the number of live births per woman – is one of the lowest in Europe, partly because so many women of childbearing age have left. It is slightly higher than that of Malta, which has twice the average monthly salary.
“The situation is desperate,” said Nebojsa Vukanovic, an elected member of the local parliament for Republika Srpksa, the largely self-governing, Serb-dominated area of Bosnia where Mr Puhalo has his family home and sheep.
The number of people living in the Serbian region is not known: the last census, conducted in 2013, estimated it at just over one million. Mr Nebojsa – an outspoken critic of the area’s authoritarian leader Milorad Dodik, who claims his region has 1.4 million people – believes that number has now fallen to 800,000 or less.
Mr. Dodik “manipulates the numbers to pretend he is doing well,” Mr. Nebojsa said.
A combative and deeply corrupt Serbian nationalist, Mr Dodik has repeatedly threatened to declare his territory an independent state and split Bosnia, fueling ethnic nationalism to consolidate his grip on power and avoid persecution.
To help spread his message that the Serbian region is shrinking, Mr Vukanovic recently gave a speech released a somber video from a visit he made to the municipality of Ulog. When it was part of Yugoslavia, it had a population of more than 7,000, a peaceful multi-ethnic country that became embroiled in war in 1991. Now, he said in an interview, the country has only seven year-round residents, and its streets are lined with crumbling buildings that have not been destroyed by armed forces. conflict, but through neglect.
Michael Murphy, the United States ambassador to Bosnia and a frequent critic of Mr. Dodik, points to demographic problems as evidence of his mismanagement of Republika Srpska, known as RS
“If downsizing the RS is Mr. Dodik’s goal, then he has succeeded,” Mr. Murphy said in an October statement, citing figures showing that the Serbian entity’s labor force shrank by 10 percent had shrunk.
The second part of Bosnia, a Croatian-Muslim federation, has also lost large numbers of people. Croatian areas of the federation – where most residents have passports from neighboring European Union member Croatia and can travel and work freely throughout the bloc – have been particularly hard hit by the exodus.
“It is clear that people are leaving all parts of the country,” said Emir Kremic, director general of Bosnia’s state statistics agency.
But how many have disappeared, he said, is not known exactly, largely because it is not clear how many people are left. “We just don’t know how many people live here,” he says. Before that, he added, “We need a new census.”
However, that is not something that ethnonationalist politicians, who are afraid of the results, want. Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups – Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats – are all afraid of losing in the numbers game. After the 2013 census, it took three years of wrangling before the results were announced, as each group wanted to see larger numbers, and therefore more political influence, for their own communities.
Mr Kremic said a rough indication of the population decline was a study conducted last year by his Institute of Statistics to assess the use of Bosnia’s agricultural land. It showed that 30 percent of farming households recorded during the 2013 census had disappeared.
“There was no one there anymore,” he said.
The last census estimated Bosnia’s total population at 3.5 million, up from 4.4 million at the previous census, a year before the war broke out. By some estimates, the year-round population is now less than two million. The Vienna Institute of Demography calculated that Bosnia experienced a population decline of 22 percent between 1990 and 2017, largely due to emigration, the strongest decline in the region.
The national birth rate has fallen continuously since 1999 and, after a brief period of post-war return, emigration has increased again, contributing to what a Bosnian Academy of Sciences report called a “demographic winter”, driven by economic concerns and a ‘collective depression’. about the country’s prospects.
At the University of Sarajevo, in the country’s capital, students are divided over whether to stay or leave. Some, especially those from well-connected families, see no reason to risk emigrating. Others are gloomy about their chances if they stay.
Enis Katina, a criminology student, said he would like to work in the Bosnian police, but sees “no real prospects for young people in this country.” Leaving, he added, “is the only future we have.”
Muris Cicic, the head of the Academy of Sciences and co-author of the report, said Bosnia was not as hopeless as many residents, especially young people, think, but it is still beset by gloom about the future due to the constant bickering of a political party. The elite is widely seen as corrupt and selfish.
“Political instability is the main driver that pushes people to leave or think about it,” Mr Cicic said. A return to war, he added, was highly unlikely, but fears of it, fueled by Bosnia’s highly partisan news media and inflammatory statements from politicians like Mr. Dodik, have left many in a state of despair.
“The system here is unworkable and everything looks so hopeless,” he said.
Among those gloomy about their country’s prospects is Eldin Hadzic, a 40-year-old mechanic who fled to Germany to escape the war in the early 1990s, returned in 1998 and is now determined to leave again. He recently traveled from his home in Sipovo to Sarajevo to visit a private visa agency that provided advice on how to get out.
“Anyone with any intelligence should go,” Mr. Hadzic said, condemning all politicians, regardless of ethnicity, as frauds. “They are all the same, just pursuing their own personal interests,” he said. “To make your dreams come true in Bosnia, you have to be a thief.”
Una Regoje in Sarajevo reported.