Migrations: Macedonia

Macedonia had constituted until very recently a fortunate exception in the Balkans landscape, having managed transition from Federal membership to independence in a peaceful manner. Proximity to war scenarios, joined with relative internal stability, determined an influx of a considerable number of refugees from neighbouring states. The brief conflict occurred in Macedonia in 2001 put an end to the �Macedonian exception� and let the country experience an inner refugees/IDPs dilemma.

The first fluxes of refugees started at the beginning of the Nineties: at the height of the Bosnian war, refugees reached a peak of 31,542 officially registered presences in the country; other estimates indicate that refugees actually were twice as many. In that phase, 91 percent of refugees were from Bosnia Herzegovina, while 9 percent from Croatia.
Yet a completely different impact was to derive from the mass migration from Kosovo (around 300,000 individuals) that took place at the time of the NATO bombardment on the territory of former Yugoslavia. As in the case of Kosovar refugees hosted in Albania, post-conflict return was been rather speedy: by July 1999 only 23,000 refugees still remained in Macedonia and, by the end of 2000, virtually all refugees belonging to the Albanian community had returned to Kosovo.
At the end of 2001, a total of 3,500 refugees was present in the country � almost entirely belonging to ethnic minorities represented in Kosovo, with the exception of 50 Bosniaks from Republika Srspska.

Throughout 2001, major concerns arose over population displacements caused by the internal conflict between the Macedonian armed forces and the Albanian nationalist armed group UCK (KLA). From February to August 2002 more than 175,000 Macedonian citizens were compelled to leave their homes: among them, about 100,000 trespassed the borders, while 75,000 remained within the national frontiers.
By the end of the year, the number of refugees decreased to 22,000 and that of IDPs to 21,000.

As regards voluntary migrations, Macedonian authorities set up an official emigrants/immigrants register according to which about 10,000 have left the country from 1991 to 1999. Such data seem rather unreliable. As confirmed by the 1994 census, in fact, only in the 1990-1994 period 48892 persons have left the country: 80 percent to European countries, 12 percent to Australia and 5.5 percent to North-America. An interesting remark: 6.7 percent of emigrants held a higher education or University degree.