He said a big hurdle to the return was Croatia's "flexible" list of war crimes suspects "which is constantly being amended so that this list of about one thousand people holds in check probably 70,000 who fear they are on it and that they will have problems if they return to Croatia".
According to Dabetic, over the past two years the Croatian authorities have given "clear messages" that they advocate the return of Serb refugees. He added, however, that this was not enough as "there are one thousand obstacles in the local authorities".
Dabetic said the basic problem were tenancy rights and that there were more than 30,000 such cases. "If you multiply that with the average refugee family, about 100,000 people depend on the settlement of this problem."
Stating that statistics "sometimes pain a false picture," he said there were about 300,000 refugees in Serbia, of whom more than 200,000 from Croatia, "but many have acquired citizenship and no longer have refugee status".
He said many people have dual status, "somebody is a returnee, but has gained citizenship here... Someone is just a formal returnee. They have all the Croatian papers, have formally registered there as returnees but could not survive so they came back to Serbia".
Dabetic said returnees were pensioners or farmers and that those who fled urban areas were returning in very small numbers, if they did at all, "because they don't have the conditions".