ARC To Launch Projects To Help Displaced People in Serbia and Montenegro

American Refugee Committee
Thursday, 13 July 2000

The American Refugee Committee (ARC) is poised to step up its efforts to help displaced people in Serbia and Montenegro return to their homes with support from the U.S. Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (BPRM).

Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them ethnic Serbs and Roma (Gypsies), remain uprooted in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the wake of the conflicts that swept the Balkans in the 1990s. BPRM has agreed to provide one-year grants of just over $2 million to finance ARC projects to help refugees in Serbia and Montenegro return to their pre-war communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.

These projects will be integrated into ARC's pioneering Regional Linkage Implementation Mechanism, its cross-border program to help minority populations throughout the region return to their homes. ARC will provide a range of services in both the departing and receiving communities, including liaison officers, legal aid, professional training, income-generation projects and mobile outreach medical and psychosocial programs.

BPRM has also provided a separate six-month grant of about $924,000 to finance an emergency health project for displaced persons in Serbia. ARC will assess emergency hygiene and health care needs, provide hygiene packs to nursing mothers and their children, implement a health education campaign and support community health facilities.

Serbia is host to about 250,000 internally displaced persons who fled Kosovo in 1999 and about 450,000 refugees who fled Bosnia and Croatia in the mid-1990s. Montenegro hosts more than 50,000 refugees and internally displaced people from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. The influx has put a severe strain on the infrastructure of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

ARC has been active in the Balkans since 1993, when it began helping refugees in Croatia who had fled wartorn Bosnia.

The American Refugee Committee is an international nonprofit, non-sectarian organization providing multisectoral humanitarian assistance and training to hundreds of thousands of people in Africa, Asia and Europe. ARC works for the survival, health, and well-being of refugees, displaced persons, and those at risk, and seeks to enable them to rebuild productive lives of dignity and purpose, striving always to respect the values of those served.

For more information, or to contact American Refugee Committee, see their website at: www.archq.org