Strangers either way: the lives of Croatian refugees in their new home

Abstract

Croatia gained world attention during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and in this context has been dealt with only with regards to conflict and cleansing, war crimes, virulent nationalism, and sometimes also emergent regionalism. This book offers a different insight into Croatia in the 1990s: it deals with one of the consequences of the war, namely, with the more or less forcible migration of Croats from Serbia and their settlement in Croatia, supposedly their ethnic homeland. It shows that at a time at which Croatia was perceived as a homogenized nation-in-the-making, there were tensions and ruptures within Croatian society caused by newly arrived refugees and displaced persons from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, who, in spite of their common ethnicity with the homeland population were treated as foreigners, indeed, as unwanted aliens.