Varna is a small village 11km away from the city of Šabac, in west Serbia. 42 Serbians have been living in a refugee camp here for the past 20 years. The camp, owned by the Serbian Red Cross, was built in 1993 when 18,000 refugees from Croatia and Bosnia arrived in the Šabac province.

Between the village and the open fields are ten small white houses: eight are two-unit houses, one is a kitchen and common room, and the last one is the director’s office. The narrow gravel road crosses a small lawn, leading to the houses and a little playground.

Slavko - from the Šabac Red Cross - and Daniel welcome us to the camp. Daniel is 34, he fled from Croatia and has been living in the camp since 1998. He tells us about Zagreb, where he used to live with his family.

“In my old building, 95 per cent of the people were Croatian, the so-called ustaša,” he says. “They used to come knocking on our doors saying “četnici, we’ll slit your throat tonight!””

He ran away to Serbia in 1995 with his whole family, along with many others. His life changed and is now stained with anger and bitterness: “70 per cent of Serbians working abroad stayed in west Europe, sitting on their hands; now they live like kings, while I’m still here.”

In 1998, he requested to move into the Varna camp. In the following years, Daniel and his family lost both their house and their right to return to Croatia. Today, he doesn’t want to live in the camp, which he views as a place of isolation and a symbol of social stigma: “I wasn’t able to finish school. I used to get bullied and beaten by other students every morning because I was a refugee coming from Croatia.”

Other residents ask us to write about their need to get rid of their stigma: their condition of refugees still living in a camp, who are portrayed as slackers, taking advantage of the state’s resources.

But they are not absorbing huge benefits. They can only receive assistance from the province where they’ve been registered. They also do not have full rights. They cannot vote in either Serbia or Croatia, which is contradictory. They have the right to double citizenship, and the resulting identity cards - but if they exercised this right, they would lose their refugee status and, thus, the social protection of the state.

“Around this time last year, there were 80 people in the camp. Some of them were granted apartments, but the ones who stayed are the most vulnerable,” says Slavko. The families are now fighting to make their voice heard. They want to leave the camp and move into real houses, but in reasonable conditions.

The political pressure to shut down the camp is strong. The residents have been asked to sign an agreement to move to the new projects, including 17 prefabs with 36 small apartments, whose total cost amounts to 275,000 Euro. The leading organization in this project is the Serbian NGO Housing Center, which will work alongside the non-profit Initiative for Development and Cooperation (IDC), the city of Šabac and the Commissariat for Refugees and Migration. However, the early agreements have not been honored and the quality of the promised solutions keep falling, which seems to be the reason behind the residents’ protest.

“With no warning whatsoever, they’ve relocated the project 3.5 km outside the city, in the middle of the countryside,” says one refugee. “The purchasing conditions have changed: higher prices for smaller and lower-quality apartments”. The Varna families’ representatives are furious: “We’re supposed to pay 150 Euro per square meter to live in container-like prefabs with tinfoil roofs!” adds another.

They feel isolated. According to what they say, no lawyer wants to defend them.

“The problem lies in the common conscience,” adds one refugee. “People accepted us at first, but things have changed over the course of 20 years.”

They want to leave the camp, but only with dignity and reassurance about their future. One of the oldest representatives points out: “We have time to forget the past or expose it, even if we can’t fix it, but we have to think of the present now. We have to provide a place to die for our elderly and a place to start for our youth.