CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VIII (1) ContemporaryEurasia81 | Page 117

BEATA BOEHM
labour on account of their age, weak physical condition or other handicaps,
neighbours and international volunteers offered help. The labour input
provided by such neighbours or volunteers was also valued at DM 2.10 per
hour.
Applications were submitted to the fund’s committees, which decided
on loan distributions. Credits were granted to applicants who met the lending
criteria. Repayment terms varied between three and fifteen years, depending
on credit contract’s terms and affected home’s degree of destruction.
Upon being granted a loan, credit recipients were issued vouchers that
entitled them to acquire building materials and/or labour inputs on the free
market at competitive prices negotiated by the international CARE
coordinator.
The goal of the revolving fund could not be achieved. According to
the repayment plan, the repayment of the loans that had disbursed did not
start before the premature end of the project. Effective 25 Oct. 1995, the
credit repayment collection became the responsibility of the Pakrac
community. At the project’s handover the community assumed the
contractual obligation to finance social projects from the fund.
In accordance with the plan, 100 houses were renovated on the
Croatian side. While 160 credit applications were positively reviewed on the
Serbian side, the goal of “100 houses” was not met due to procurement
problems. On account of the international embargo against Serbia, building
materials and tools were in scant supply. When taking into account all
project phases of the reconstruction programme, a total of about 500
individuals in 150 households benefitted from the CARE reconstruction
project.
Most community representatives and private persons welcomed the
presence of CARE. Some individuals indicated that they wanted CARE to
continue its work after the completion of the UN mandate. Considering that
the populations on both sides were informed that CARE was implementing
the same project on both sides, people’s trust and positive view of CARE
should be seen as a positive achievement in conflict transformation.
Due to the Croat military intervention and occupation of UNPROFOR
positions in May 1995, about 15,000 Serbs left Western Slavonia, most of
them for Eastern Slavonia, and some for Bosnia. The technical director of
the Serbian CARE Building-Market was shot dead. Confirmed by the
Helsinki Federation for Human Rights in Zagreb, about 1,100 persons were
killed while fleeing during the “Blitz operation”. According to the Croatian
government’s statement of 22 May1995, 188 Serbs were killed during the
“Blitz operation”, among them 54 civilians. In the middle of May,
international human rights observers discovered large areas of recently
moved earth in a cemetery south of Okucani. The Croatian government did
not comment on these findings and no further investigations took place.
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