|PIC1|A bishop in Bosnia-Herzegovina has spoken of a possible breakthrough for Catholic refugees still unable to return home more than a decade after the end of the Balkan wars.

Only a tiny proportion of Catholic Croats exiled in the Balkan wars of the 1990s have gone back to what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In an interview with the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, Bishop Franjo Komarica of Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s second largest city, described how the refugee crisis may be eased following a meeting of leading politicians.

After years of struggle on behalf of Catholic Croats from Bosnia-Herzegovina exiled to nearby countries, Bishop Komarica instigated a meeting of senior politicians from the country’s local government of Republika Srpska as well as representatives of ethnic groups.

Bishop Komarica said the Federal Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina had since assured him that it would consider the Church’s proposals to encourage the return of the refugees.

The wars that engulfed much of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s caused Catholic Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina to plummet from a high of 220,000 to barely 11,600 today, according to the bishop.

Bishop Komarica has long complained that little of the aid given to returning refugees has gone to Catholic Croats, meaning that those who have returned face very poor living conditions.

The bishop described how the country’s Catholic population lived as if “in an old people's home” because only mainly the elderly had returned.

“The refugees have no houses left and if they do return they often have to live without running water or electricity," he said.

“They cannot find work and in society generally it is often made clear to them that they are unwelcome.”

The bishop said that because most of those returning had been old, the Catholic population had actually shrunk since the end of the war in 1995.

But now Bishop Komarica is hoping that “at last the Catholics will also get their fair share” of aid, of which he said only two per cent had gone to Croats.

The bishop underlined the Church’s work “to promote the welfare of all people in Bosnia-Herzegovina", stressing that the Catholic-run ‘European Schools’ were open to people of all faiths and ethnicities.

The war in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina followed the collapse of the former communist state of Yugoslavia and caused the deaths of some 243,000 people.

A further two million people left their homes following the division of the republic into separate states.