When the Bosnian sheep farmer fled his home in a disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1992, walking with his family for 40 days to escape the start of a war that would pit neighbor against neighbor, the village he left behind had more than 400 people, two stores and a school.
More than half the villagers were Muslims and the rest Serbs, but no one, he said, paid much attention to that until extremist politicians began screaming for blood.
After more than a decade away from his home in eastern Bosnia, farmer Fikret Puhalo, 61, returned to his village, Socice. By then he had about 100 people, Serbs who had stayed there and some Muslims who had decided it was safe to return.
Today there are only 15 left. The shops have disappeared, as has the school.
“Everyone else died or moved away,” Puhalo said, pointing to the empty houses scattered across the rocky hills surrounding the family land where their sheep graze. “Not a single child has been born here since I returned,” he said.
Socice’s demise reflects a global phenomenon in which poor agricultural areas are losing people to urban centers. It is also part of a serious demographic crisis affecting large parts of central and eastern Europe, including relatively prosperous countries such as Poland and Hungary, as low birth rates and emigration reduce population numbers and feed ethno-nationalist politicians. who cry out against dilution. even extinction of native populations.
In countries like Hungary, nationalists, warning that their own people are at risk of disappearing and being replaced by foreigners, have railed against immigrants, despite severe labor shortages. They have also promoted mostly useless state-funded programs aimed at enticing local women to have more children.
Yet nowhere else have demographics and the politics around them been as tense as in Bosnia, a small, ethnically fractured nation. Like many poorer countries, it has a high emigration rate, which increased during the 1992-95 war. But it also has an extremely low birth rate, a phenomenon usually associated with wealthier countries.
In Socice, the population has declined more sharply during the last 20 years, which have been entirely peaceful, than during the Bosnian war.
In a cemetery of the town’s mosque, rebuilt from the ruins left by the war, a mound of earth contains the body of Faris Suljanic, who emigrated to work in Austria, where he died, at the age of 27, in a car accident. traffic in 2021.
Down a dirt road from Mr. Puhalo’s land is the abandoned house of Veljko Samardzija, who died unmarried several years ago, leaving the house filled with his few belongings: a worn Yugoslav passport, faded family photographs, a small refrigerator and a voluminous television set. Mr. Samardzija’s two cousins died in a nearby house, also unmarried and childless.
Bosnia’s fertility rate (the number of live births per woman) is one of the lowest in Europe, partly because many women of childbearing age have left. It is just ahead of Malta, which has double the average monthly salary.
“The situation is desperate,” said Nebojsa Vukanovic, an elected member of the local parliament of Republika Srpksa, the largely autonomous, Serb-dominated part of Bosnia where Puhalo has his family home and sheep.
The number of people living in the Serbian region is unknown: the last census, carried out in 2013, put it at just over one million. Vukanovic, an outspoken critic of the area’s authoritarian leader Milorad Dodik, who claims his region has 1.4 million people, believes the number has now dropped to 800,000 or less.
Dodik “manipulates the numbers to pretend he is doing a good job,” Vukanovic said.
Dodik, a belligerent nationalist who has been sanctioned by the United States for corruption, has repeatedly threatened to declare his territory an independent state and divide Bosnia, stoking ethnic nationalism to consolidate his grip on power and avoid prosecution.
To help spread his message that the Serbian region is declining, Vukanovic recently posted a grim video of a visit he made to the municipality of Ulog. It had more than 7,000 inhabitants when it was part of Yugoslavia, a peaceful, multiethnic nation that erupted into war in 1991. Now, he said in an interview, it has only seven year-round residents, its streets lined with ruined buildings destroyed not by armed forces. conflict but due to negligence.
Michael Murphy, the US ambassador to Bosnia and a frequent critic of Dodik, points to demographic problems as evidence of his misrule of the Republika Srpska, known as RS.
“If reducing RS is Mr. Dodik’s goal, he is achieving it,” Murphy said in an October statement, citing figures showing the Serbian entity’s workforce had shrunk by 10 percent in a single year.
Bosnia’s second component, a Croat-Muslim federation, has also lost large numbers of people. Mainly the Croatian areas of the federation, where most residents hold passports from neighboring European Union member Croatia and can travel and work freely throughout the bloc, have been particularly affected by the exodus.
“It is clear that people are leaving all parts of the country,” said Emir Kremic, director general of Bosnia’s state statistics agency.
But it is not known precisely how many have left, he said, largely because it is not clear how many people remain. “We just don’t know how many people live here,” she said. For that, he added, “we need a new census.”
That, however, is not something that ethno-nationalist politicians, fearful of the results, want. Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups (Muslim Bosnians, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Catholic Croats) fear losing in the numbers game. It took three years of wrangling after the 2013 census for the results to be published, because each group wanted to see larger numbers and therefore more political influence for their own community.
Kremic said a rough guide to how much the population had declined was a study conducted last year by his Statistical Institute to assess the use of Bosnia’s agricultural land. He found that 30 percent of agricultural households recorded during the 2013 census had disappeared.
“There was no one there anymore,” he said.
The latest census put Bosnia’s total population at 3.5 million, down from 4.4 million in the previous count, a year before the war broke out. According to some estimates, the figure is currently below two million inhabitants throughout the year. The Institute of Demography in Vienna estimated that between 1990 and 2017, Bosnia suffered a 22 percent population decline, largely due to emigration, the steepest decline in the region.
The national birth rate has fallen continuously since 1999 and, after a brief period of post-war returns, emigration has increased again, contributing to what a Bosnian Academy of Sciences report called a “demographic winter” driven by economic worries and a “collective depression.” about the country’s prospects.
At the University of Sarajevo, in the country’s capital, students are divided over whether to stay or go. Some, especially those from well-connected families, see no reason to risk emigrating. Others are despondent about their chances if they stay.
Enis Katina, a criminology student, said he would like to get a job in the Bosnian police, but he sees “no real prospects for the young people of this country.” Leaving, she added, “is the only future we have.”
Muris Cicic, director of the Academy of Sciences and co-author of their report, said Bosnia was not as hopeless as many residents, especially young people, believe, but was still beset by pessimism about the future due to constant bickering by A politician. elite widely seen as corrupt and selfish.
“Political instability is the main factor that pushes people to leave or think about leaving,” Cicic said. A return to war, he added, was highly unlikely, but the fear of it, stoked by Bosnia’s highly partisan media and the inflammatory statements of politicians like Dodik, has left many in a state of despair.
“The system here is unviable and everything seems hopeless,” he said.
Among those despondent about his country’s prospects is Eldin Hadzic, a 40-year-old mechanic who fled to Germany in the early 1990s to escape the war, returned in 1998 and is now determined to leave again. He recently traveled from his home in Sipovo to Sarajevo to visit a private visa agency that sells advice on how to leave.
“Anyone with a little bit of intelligence has to go,” Hadzic said, calling all politicians, regardless of their ethnicity, criminals. “Everyone is equal, just behind their own personal interests,” he said. “To make your dreams come true in Bosnia, you have to be a thief.”
Una Regoje in Sarajevo contributed reporting.