"Law on restitution to be passed in 2011"

In principle, one should return property taken from people during regime changes such as the one in Yugoslavia in 1945. But I fear that this new law, when it comes into force, could contain the potential for abuse.

I often visited Tito’s Yugoslavia and I sometimes met reasonably well-off people who, communist supporters or not, had retained much or all of their property and land. As far as I know, only extremely wealthy individuals; large, often foreign, corporations and Nazi sympathisers suffered major confiscations of property without compensation.

I’m no communist, but even as a minarchist (small, limited government) libertarian, I can understand why Tito’s regime did this, given the extremes of wealth and foreign domination of the economy before 1945 in what was, in effect, a semi-feudal rather than genuinely capitalist state.

The exception to this, in my view, was the German community in parts of northern Yugoslavia who, unless they were married to other Yugoslavs, had to leave whether they had supported Hitler or not, and many of whom were not wealthy at all. To this day, for example, there are some underdeveloped parts of Vojvodina as a result of this extreme move.

Nevertheless, the problem with allowing property to be returned to its pre-1945 owners, even if current owners are compensated well, is that it could not only give rise to a tsunami of legal disputes (good for lawyers!), but also uproot many innocent individuals and families from their long-standing homes and communities and with no guarantees that they would find equal or better alternatives. In other words, it will simply reverse the crime rather than serve it justice. It might also antagonize the existing problem of Yugoslavs uprooted from their homes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1991-99 war.

And with the descendants and successors of pre-1945 powerful landowners and foreign corporations returning to Serbia, this could further aggravate the already existing disparities of wealth that have arisen since the fall of communism over twenty years ago.

Clearly, this is a law that, despite its ostensible noble intentions, needs to be thought through very carefully and not enacted, like so many other laws, simply to placate the West for the sake of a dubious and uncertain EU future.

In principle, one should return property taken from people during regime changes such as the one in Yugoslavia in 1945. But I fear that this new law, when it comes into force, could contain the potential for abuse.

I often visited Tito’s Yugoslavia and I sometimes met reasonably well-off people who, communist supporters or not, had retained much or all of their property and land. As far as I know, only extremely wealthy individuals; large, often foreign, corporations and Nazi sympathisers suffered major confiscations of property without compensation.

I’m no communist, but even as a minarchist (small, limited government) libertarian, I can understand why Tito’s regime did this, given the extremes of wealth and foreign domination of the economy before 1945 in what was, in effect, a semi-feudal rather than genuinely capitalist state.

The exception to this, in my view, was the German community in parts of northern Yugoslavia who, unless they were married to other Yugoslavs, had to leave whether they had supported Hitler or not, and many of whom were not wealthy at all. To this day, for example, there are some underdeveloped parts of Vojvodina as a result of this extreme move.

Nevertheless, the problem with allowing property to be returned to its pre-1945 owners, even if current owners are compensated well, is that it could not only give rise to a tsunami of legal disputes (good for lawyers!), but also uproot many innocent individuals and families from their long-standing homes and communities and with no guarantees that they would find equal or better alternatives. In other words, it will simply reverse the crime rather than serve it justice. It might also antagonize the existing problem of Yugoslavs uprooted from their homes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1991-99 war.

And with the descendants and successors of pre-1945 powerful landowners and foreign corporations returning to Serbia, this could further aggravate the already existing disparities of wealth that have arisen since the fall of communism over twenty years ago.

Clearly, this is a law that, despite its ostensible noble intentions, needs to be thought through very carefully and not enacted, like so many other laws, simply to placate the West for the sake of a dubious and uncertain EU future.