Jurković, Rahela.
(2018).
Integration of persons under international protection in Croatian society.
PhD Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology.
(Poslijediplomski doktorski studij etnologije i kulturne antropologije)
[mentor Rajković Iveta, Marijeta].
Abstract
Integration of persons under international protection is one of the current political and social
issues in the European Union and Croatia, as its member state but also a country that, in autumn
and winter 2015/2016 became part of the migrants’ movements across, what the European
Commission calls, the Western Balkan route. The persons under international protection are the
refugees who have been granted asylum or subsidiary protection in Croatia. Their integration
in society depends upon the rights they, as refugees, have in the Republic of Croatia and how
these rights are implemented, as well as upon the support and assistance in integration provided
to them by institutions, organisations, local communities and citizens. The research approach
used in this dissertation is the ethnography of particular, that served as a basis for getting deeper
and more comprehensive insights and answers to the following research goals: finding out what
integration means to those who got international protection in Croatia and what are their
experiences of integration, how, according to them, the integration-related legislation has been
implemented, and how non-governmental organisations and individuals participate in and
support the process of their integration into Croatian society. The research has been based on
the grounded theory and traditional qualitative ethnographic methods: field research,
observation, participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The role of local
organisations in the integration of persons under international protection has been also
researched within two case studies: the culinary cooperative Taste of Home and the football
club NK Zagreb 041.
The research that is foundation of this work was conducted between February 2015 and
September 2017. By the end of the research period, according to the official data, Croatia
granted international protection to 327 persons. Some of them were the persons whom I
interviewed one or several times, and some of them I followed during the period of several
months or during the whole period of the research. My informants are persons of different
educational background (from accomplished elementary school to accomplished faculty),
different occupations (cook, sportsman, musician, professional truck driver, lawyer, housewife,
activist), different age (from 19 to 42) and different situations they were living in Croatia (as
single persons, in family or in a homeless shelter). Their countries of origin are: Afghanistan,
Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Syria and Somalia. Most of them went through traumatic
life experiences on their way from their countries of origin to Croatia, followed by difficult
times spent in asylum seekers centre while waiting for the decision about asylum. In that centre they spent from one month to more than a year. The traumatic experiences and memories of
refugees are not acknowledged nor taken care of by legislation that is the backbone of Croatian
integration policy.
For my informants, refugees, integration mainly means adaptation to a new culture, learning
local language and getting to know the culture of the society they got asylum in. For none of
them, except for a Syrian family, Croatia was a destination country, and even the Syrian family
came to Croatia within the framework of the relocation programme of the European Union
(EU), that was “distributing” asylum seekers from Greece to other EU countries. Some of my
informants did not like the term integration as it constantly reminded them that they were
refugees, the status which most of them did not like to have and identity they mostly did not
want to accept. Instead, they wanted to be regarded as human beings, and not as a special
category of asylum seekers or asylees. One informant said it in this way: “I want to be regarded
as any other Croatian citizen who lives here and goes through same difficulties as other people.
I want to talk about what is going on in Croatia, and not about asylum seeking any more”.
The results of the qualitative research that I conducted have shown that integration is a dynamic
process that depends, on the one hand, on the quality of the institutional infrastructure that
Croatian society provides to people under international protection and, on the other hand, on
the individuals who got the protection. It has been shown that the persons under international
protection (refugees) have a core influence on the success of their interaction with other
members of the community, of whom the key ones have been members of the host society. The
institutional infrastructure of integration consists of the legislation that grants rights to refugees
and institutions which implement that legislation. A person who got the international protection
in Croatia and is recognised by the state as a refugee is entitled to the same rights as Croatian
citizens, except the right to vote on national or local elections. The research has shown that the
main Croatian legislative act that grants the rights to refugees and also refers to their integration
in Croatian society, Act on International and Temporary Protection (Official gazette 70/2015),
has been partially implemented. Its implementation is the most problematic in the areas that
refugees consider as essential and having the top priority for integration: provision of state supported
Croatian language and culture courses. Learning Croatian language and culture,
together with exercising the rights to the health care and access to the education system, have
proved to be the weakest loops of the chain that the state is legally obliged to provide to the
persons it granted the international protection. The courses of Croatian language, history and culture, whose attendance for persons under international protection is even a legal obligation,
have not been organised regularly, and even when, in rare occasions, organised, they were
provided within insufficient 70 hours (for comparison: the Netherlands provided 600 hours and
Norway initial 300 hours of the integration programmes that mainly involved language
courses). Other areas of integration that have shown deficiency in law implementation have
been the access to health and access to educational system. Legislation that exists “on paper”
but is actually not implemented sheds light not only on life of refugees in Croatia during the
researched period, but also on the functioning of the institutions, and therefore the Croatian
society itself. In the researched case, Croatian legislation was not implemented fully or its
implementation depended on the political context, while the responsibility of institutions in
some cases almost did not exist. Inefficient bureaucracy and administrative barriers that my
informants encountered in Croatia, which they could not easily understand without explanations
that their new friends from the host society were giving them, are depicted in the example that
one informant gave me, describing a situation in the hospital: “To the one who is in pain, who
is sick and urgently needs medical care, you say to come next week? So, the person can die and
you do not care for strangers? First and foremost, it is necessary to take care of sick persons,
and procedures should come later… That doctor did not care about us… somebody could die
because of too many procedures”.
The research has also shown that people under international protection do not always want to
be viewed as a special category of asylum seekers or asylees, and that they want to be accepted
only as human beings. All the informants wanted to participate in the society and work, while
finding a job that would enable them to cover their basic needs proved to be the next problematic
area of integration. Non-governmental organisations and individuals, from or outside these
organisations, were most helpful to them in finding a job. Certain organisations and collectives
participating in the integration of refugees have shown to be helpful to certain asylees, and it
can be concluded that all of them are useful in integration. Non-governmental and international
organisations most frequently referred to by the informants as the ones who assisted them in
integration, especially in job search, in Croatian society were the following ones (in alphabetic
order): Are You Syrious, Centre for Peace Studies, Croatian Red Cross, Rehabilitation Centre
for Stress and Trauma Zagreb. Some informants, referring to their experiences in other
countries, have suggested that there should be more organisations that help refugees and asylum
seekers, and that they should employ more people instead of relying on the volunteers and their
free time, that these organisations usually engage in their work of assisting integration of refugees. They should also apply an individual approach to people, what some of them claim
to do, but the research has shown that in reality the individual approach to refugees is often not
happening. Furthermore, organisations or groups of people that do not have integration as one
of their goals are beneficial in integration as well, such as sport clubs. Football and cricket, i.e.
sport in general, showed to be areas of the greatest potential for integration because sport does
not divide people and, while playing sport, everyone speaks the same language. Food, or its
preparation and consumption, has also proved to be a means capable of connecting people that
would otherwise not approach each other and start communicating. Researched case studies,
the culinary cooperative Taste of the Home and the football club NK Zagreb 041, have therefore
shown to be organisations with a significant potential to create spaces where people under
international protection could find something like a family environment, what most of the
informants lacked in their life in asylum.
Of many integration dimensions that migration scholars refer to in their work, interaction
dimension showed to be the most important for refugees that are supposed to integrate into
Croatian society: the interaction, that refers to their connections to local people and new friends
from the host society, helps them in many areas that integration involves. Besides that, this
research acknowledges the importance of existential dimension of integration, that other
scholars do not recognise as such, probably as they mostly conudcted their research in wealthier
countries of Europe or other parts of the “developed” world. The existential dimension of
integration into Croatian society refers to learning Croatian language and possibility of getting
a job that would cover core needs and basic life costs that a person who got international
protection in Croatia encounters once the state’s assistance in covering the costs of rent of
apartment expires, two years after the international protection is granted to the person.
This research has also opened further research questions regarding the integration of refugees
in Croatia and it has demonstrated, on the one side, the need to include Croatia in broader
European research projects on integration and, on the other side, the need to involve cultural
anthropologists in multidisciplinary research teams, with an aim of comprehending all the facets
that the integration of refugees into society involves.
Item Type: |
PhD Thesis
|
Uncontrolled Keywords: |
person under international protection, refugee, asylee, asylum, integration |
Subjects: |
Ethnology and cultural anthropology |
Departments: |
Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology |
Supervisor: |
Rajković Iveta, Marijeta |
Additional Information: |
Poslijediplomski doktorski studij etnologije i kulturne antropologije |
Date Deposited: |
19 Mar 2018 09:35 |
Last Modified: |
19 Mar 2018 09:37 |
URI: |
http://darhiv.ffzg.unizg.hr/id/eprint/9661 |
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