Croatian President Ivo Josipovic and his guest, the visiting Serbian President Boris Tadic, on Thursday afternoon visited the town of Gracac in the central region of Lika and a local produce fair, where they talked to the exhibitors and tasted their products.
The two presidents spent about half an hour touring some 20 stands with locally made food, including cheese, juices, wine, brandy, and honey, as well as handicrafts, and talking to the exhibitors.
President Tadic, whose grandmother had lived in a village 15 kilometres from Gracac, met at the fair a relative living in Lika.
Around 5,000-6,000 people live in Gracac of the 15,000 who have Gracac as their place of residence in their documents.
The reconstruction of houses that were destroyed in the 1990s war has been mostly completed and the housing issue is not an obstacle to refugee return, but the weak economic activity is, said the two presidents' hosts, led by municipal head Goran Djekic.
Apart from fish-processing and forest management, local residents live on cattle farming, cheese-making and fruit-growing.
Asked how problems of returnees to Gracac could be solved, Tadic replied, "People expect us to be magicians."
"I would like us to have more power in our hands, but we live in poor countries that have serious problems inherited from the past," he said.
After visiting the fair in Gracac, Tadic and Josipovic visited a Serb returnee family in the nearby village of Deringaj.
The family house of Nina and Zeljko Markovic, who have two underage children, has been reconstructed and they have jobs.
The family fled the village for Serbia during the Croatian police and army operation Storm in 1995 and returned in 2003.
The two presidents had a cup of coffee with their hosts, inquiring about their living conditions and the living conditions of other returnees.
About a dozen villagers gathered in front of the Markovic house to greet the two presidents.
Thirty of some 200 prewar residents of Deringaj today live in the village.
Zeljko Markovic, a former member of the rebel Croatian Serb army who now works with his wife in a local fish-processing factory, said that he was not afraid to return because he had not done anything wrong.
He said that he did not have any problems with local Croats.
"I was born here, I grew up here, here is my home and family, and Croatia is my homeland," Markovic stressed.
