John Sparrow in Zagreb
Amid the snow-covered hills of central Croatia, Radmila Brujic stared out, stone-faced, from the window of the Red Cross pick-up truck. It had been a long, hard journey, and though it was almost over, she remained full of uncertainty.
Radmila, a 62-year-old nurse, was going home, but where, she wondered, would that be. The flat she had lived in with her husband before conflict had chased them away? A camp for homeless returnees? A room with friends or relatives? And how would she live? Did she qualify in Croatia for a pension? Both Christmases, the Catholic and the Orthodox, would be vexing ones for this ethnic Serb widow.
Her journey had begun in 1995, in the turmoil of the former Yugoslavia, when a military operation known as Storm was underway. Thousands fled before an advancing Croat army. A stream of people headed eastwards, to Bosnia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, where the number of refugees from Croatia swelled to 340,000. Among them, Radmila and her family sought shelter in Montenegro, her birthplace.
They had left Croatia with what they could carry and when, near the town of Sisak, she stepped off a bus with other returnees more than six years later, she brought much the same. Only now she was alone. Her husband, overwhelmed by the news that Croatia had confirmed his citizenship, died of a heart attack last July. Her children had remained in Montenegro, unsure where to seek their future.
She gathered her bags and looked around anxiously. Her eyes asked, "What happens now?" A Croatian Red Cross worker from one of the mobile teams awaiting the returning Serbs, helped her. Her possessions were loaded and he drove her the final one and a half hours to what will be her home temporarily. Her husband's brother and his wife awaited her in a small, warm house on the edge of a village in the Gvozd district, near Sisak. They hugged and kissed, and shed a few tears.
Over the months ahead, the Croatian Red Cross will keep in touch with Radmila, bring her food and other supplies, stay and talk a while, listen to her problems, furnish information. Throughout the former Yugoslavia, Red Cross National Societies provide community support, assistance, and home care to people still suffering from its break-up, and a Federation-supported population movement programme is today strengthening their response.
The need is enormous. A decade after the sudden Yugoslav dissolution, more than one and are half million people in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, wait to go home or remain vulnerable as a consequence of the conflict.
Some people are returning. By the end of November, some 21,300 - refugees and internally displaced - had returned to home areas in Croatia this year. It brought the total number of returnees to 325,600. But that isn't the end of their stories.
There is more to going home than arriving, and for many, a long and painful process has only just begun.
Radmila's is a case in point. For more than 30 years, she and her husband worked in the same hospital. As was normal practice, the hospital provided them with a flat and it was theirs - should they require it - for the rest of their lives. The conflict changed all that. Radmila fled to Montenegro, and her flat provided shelter for Bosnian refugees. Getting it back, if she ever can, will not be easy. It will take time, and she will struggle in the interim, not least because she has no income.
Who she is, where she came from, and what she is entitled to, has to be determined, and that, in the context of Croatia's ongoing social crisis, is an agonizingly complex process.
Radmila went home for Christmas but she still has far to travel.