The Swiss authorities said Monday they were hopeful that an agreement with Macedonia could still be reached this week to allow the return of Kosovo refugees from Switzerland.

The Swiss authorities said Monday they were hopeful that an agreement with Macedonia could still be reached this week to allow the return of Kosovo refugees from Switzerland.

Urs Hadorn, the Swiss government’s special representative for Kosovo, said hundreds of ethnic Albanian refugees were anxious to obtain travel papers from the Swiss authorities so that they could return home.
He explained that a direct repatriation flight was not possible at the moment and that refugees would therefore be flown to the Macedonian capital Skopje, from where they would cross into neighbouring Kosovo.

Some of the refugees have accused Swiss police of holding them back against their will. But Hadorn said Macedonia still refused to let any refugees cross its territory unless they had proper identification papers.

Many of the Kosovo refugees told international aid organisations that Serbian army and police forces had systematically taken away those identification documents before forcing them to leave the Balkan province.

Hadorn said Switzerland was now hoping that the Macedonian government would change its transit policy. “We hope that Macedonia will agree to our travel document policy by the end of this week,” he said.

Switzerland’s Federal Refugee Office said Monday that a record 9,580 asylum requests had been filed in June. Nearly 90 percent of those requests were made by people who had fled the fighting in Kosovo.

A spokeswoman for the office said that, by the end of the year, the number of asylum requests was expected to surpass 60,000.

The massive influx of refugees has sparked a heated political debate about how many refugees should be admitted into the country and how long they should be allowed to stay.

The government has proposed a one-year temporary work ban for the Kosovo refugees. But the Swiss cantons – which hand out those work permits – were rather critical of the proposal, arguing that a work ban might turn out to be counterproductive as it would likely increase crime among asylum seekers.

As of the beginning of this month, the Swiss authorities are providing financial assistance to those refugees who are willing to return to Kosovo.


Sources: APD, sda-ats

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