Report 1:
Why Bosnia; Exodus; protests; Scandal. Report 2:
Impunity, manipulation, activism. Report 3:
Aluminij conglomerate; Corruption at Gikil. Report 4:
Political charades; militarization of police. Report 5:
Pride in Sarajevo. Report 6:
Migrants stuck in BiH on the way to Europe.
To contact Peter
in response to these reports or any of his articles,
Today in Bosnia, there are two major, intractable problems. One is
the Dayton regime that enshrines ethnic partition and endorses the
reign of three corrupt, ethno-nationalist political infrastructures
that cooperate to divide and rule their respective, corralled
populations. We know about that problem; it's practically all I ever
write about.
The other problem is relatively new in Bosnia, but it's looking just
about as permanent: the ongoing influx, since 2017, of "refugees"
and "migrants," mostly from the Middle East, who are trying to
travel to EU countries where they hope they can resettle and rebuild
their lives. I wrote about this problem in
2015 and
last year. Earlier, the influx was primarily on the
Macedonia-Serbia-Hungary/Croatia route. When possibilities for
transit through those countries became significantly restricted,
people shifted their route to go through Bosnia-Herzegovina. It
seemed improbable at first, since Bosnia, a rival for the poorest
country and least stable state in Europe, has practically nothing to
offer refugees. But Bosnia is on the route, and attempting passage
through that country seems better than drowning at sea.
Both of the above problems are called "crises," as if they are
temporary. Well, "temporary" lasts an awful long time in Bosnia. In
an earlier report I re-named the problem a "crisis of humanity." Nor
am I particularly comfortable with the terms "migrant" and
"refugee." I'm in favor of thinking of them as people.
Most of the migrants come into Bosnia from the east and south, via
Serbia and Montenegro. They hurry through the Republika Srpska (one
of Bosnia's two "entities"), which has refused to offer any
assistance and treats the travelers viciously upon contact. They
come through Sarajevo, and most try to head for the northwestern
part of the Federation, Bosnia's Croat- and Bosniak-controlled
entity. There, the Uno-Sanski Kanton (USK – in English, the Una-Sana
Canton) borders on Croatia and people can take the chance to cross
into that EU member-state and keep on moving.
The numbers of migrants quoted vary wildly and it is questionable
whether anyone really knows, since these people embody the meaning
of "undocumented" in every sense. But reports hold that some 25,000
came into Bosnia in 2018, and another 24,000 through October of this
year. However, these "statistics" obscure the political haplessness
of Bosnia, and the human suffering as well.
On one hand, ordinary Bosnians try to be understanding and
hospitable with the migrants; I have witnessed their kindness in the
parks, on the streetcars and buses, and at the bus and train
stations. After all, Bosnians know a lot about being refugees. On
the other hand, the state- and Federation-level governments have
proven just about useless, so far, in responding to the uncontrolled
influx of travelers. With most of the migrants stopping in the
northwestern cities of Bužim, Cazin, Velika Kladuša, and especially
Bihać, care for thousands of sorry travelers has been dumped on the
mayor of that city, Šuhret Fazlić, and on the Uno-Sanski Canton.
People arrive in the USK, pull themselves together, and try to move
across the border into Croatia. Given the size of the influx into
Bosnia-Herzegovina over the past couple of years, and the fact that
the number present in Bosnia today is much lower than that overall
total, it seems apparent that some thousands have succeeded in
moving on through Croatia and Slovenia to more affluent and stable
lands. One report holds that of the 25,000 migrants who arrived in
2018, only 3,500 remained in Bosnia.
For most people who have arrived in Bosnia, it is a priority to
register their request for asylum. Under international law, all
countries are required to accept and register people's application
for asylum, regardless of where they come from. Few of the travelers
wish to remain in Bosnia, but possession of an asylum document, in
some sense, legitimizes their presence in the country. And it is a
way of buying time until they can move on.
A late-August report had 2,300 migrants living in the camps in the
northwest, and another 2,000 in parks and in private accommodations.
In mid-September one report put the migrant presence in USK at
"3,500 to 5,500," and another at "6,000 to 8,000." So it is hard to
tell, and the number keeps fluctuating—but, most probably, it is
rising, with reports of 100 to 150 new people arriving in the canton
every day.
There are about five centers in the Uno-Sanski Canton where refugees
have been placed. Two, "Bira" and "Miral," are privately owned and
funded by international organizations such as the International
Organization for Migrants (IOM). For a time, many people slept in
parks and all available "green spaces" around Bihać.
As the numbers grew, local citizens began to feel crowded, and
authorities discouraged camping. They directed travelers to the
established camps, which soon filled up. Another one, on state-owned
property, was established at
Vučjak in June. The international community objected to the
location, but many migrants were nevertheless relocated there.
The European Union and the IOM have sternly criticized use of the
site at Vučjak for several reasons. Vučjak is "too close to the
Croatian border"; it used to be a garbage dump; there is a minefield
nearby; and generally, conditions are not fit for human
inhabitation. With these objections the EU has, while supporting
work at Bira and Miral, declined to provide any resources to Vučjak.
The local Red Cross and some volunteers have helped, and there have
been donations from Turkey and the Bavarian Red Cross. But with
anywhere between 800 and 1,200 people stuck at Vučjak, resources
have been stretched. And there has been no electricity, unstable
water supply, few toilets, and scarce medical relief.
As summer wore on, the internationally supported camps filled to
overflowing, and migrants were gathering in the canton's population
centers. Bihać's population was said to be 20% migrants. Local
citizens
complained of feeling crowded out and endangered. One said, "It's
horrible that the EU dictates what we can do with the migrants; they
can't be put outside the city, but we can convert the city into a
ghetto." Some locals stopped shopping at stores frequented by
migrants.
There were incidents of violence. Most of them were among the
migrants themselves, but there were over 150 crimes reported in USK,
and in late August, a migrant robbed a local teenage girl with a
knife. There was a brawl in one camp involving 300 people, and a
fire broke out in Miral, with many people wounded there.
Tuberculosis was reported at Bira, where there were at least 2,000
people camped, and more recently, there has been an outbreak of
scabies. These health problems have been nearly impossible to
control, especially at
Vučjak, where there were only volunteers, including two German
doctors and a journalist/humanitarian, also from Germany.
In June, the local government decided to compel migrants who were
not already at one of the camps to go to Vučjak. They started
raiding private houses; it was reported that in one, they found 130
people, mostly elderly and without documents. There is YouTube
footage of the police rounding up hundreds of dark-skinned young men
and marching them, on foot, the 10 kilometers from Bihać to Vučjak.
Migrants have complained, understandably, that they do not
appreciate being rusticated to the woods, to a place without
resources nor services. To make matters worse, in October the German
volunteers were expelled from Vučjak for working without permits.
The matter of permits for volunteers borders on the Kafkaesque. It
takes many months and mountains of paperwork—all requiring
translation—to acquire permission to work as a volunteer on behalf
of the migrants. Good-hearted local people have brought meals,
clothing, and blankets to the newcomers. But grassroots
organizations such as the No Name Kitchen have been compelled to
work underground, for example serving meals only at night and
changing their location regularly. And in Sarajevo, the Aid Brigade
NGO was shut down completely after the Service for Foreigners'
Affairs (SFA) sent all the local volunteers home and told all
foreign volunteers to leave the country.
The local citizens' response to conditions that they have
experienced due to the presence of throngs of unfamiliar people in
their midst could be criticized as heartless—or perhaps the influx
has truly crossed the threshold of control to the point where any
ordinary person would feel threatened. But some local authorities
sounded most reasonable when, rather than criticizing the migrants,
they spoke out about the inattention of those responsible at the
entity and state level. Officials criticized the state-level Council
of Ministers, the Ministry of Security, the Foreigners' Affairs
Service, and the border police for not doing their jobs, saying that
it was "shameful that everywhere in the world, the state deals with
migrant problems, but in Bosnia-Herzegovina, only the cities of
Bihać and Velika Kladuša are doing anything."
We recall that the Bosnian state resides in a certain amount of
chaos after the 2018 elections, as one year on, the new government
has (still) not been formed. But this does not excuse the acting
officials, still in their old positions, from working on the migrant
problem. However, mayor Fazlić
noted, "We sit down for a meeting with state ministers and then they
complain to each other about how the state is not functional. That
is very frustrating....being left to ourselves in this is very
difficult for us.”
While the lives of the local people in the Uno-Sanski Canton are
disrupted, and the lives of the migrants are for the most part
miserable, unnanounced attempts to go across the border to Croatia
and beyond are ongoing. People who discuss these attempts call them
"the game," as in, "they went back into the game." They pick up at
night and leave their camps to try to cross the long and crooked
border, hoping to evade Croatian police and make their way to
Slovenia. It has become a hellish undertaking—not gamelike at all—as
the the Croatian and Slovenian authorities have taken it upon
themselves to turn back the migrants in a variety of nasty ways.
While the migrants go into the game, the Croatian police go hunting
for them, in an exercise that has come to be called "pushback." The
Croatian police have at their disposal thermal cameras, helicopters,
and drones. Theoretically, there are routes that migrants can take
through the woods all the way from the Croatian border through to
the next country; Bosnians in USK remember having had to do this
when they were fleeing the war in the 1990s. But people from
Pakistan and Afghanistan do not know the routes, and when the
Croatian police catch them, they rob the travelers, taking their
money and their cell phones, and sometimes their personal documents.
They often beat them before pushing them back across the border into
Bosnia.
A Human Rights Watch report read,
"In some cases, they [Croatian police] use force, pummeling people
with fists, kicking them, and making people cross freezing streams,
and run gauntlets between police officers. Violence is directed
against women and children..."
A report from August states that over 4,500 migrants were turned
back from Slovenia into Croatia. Those who have been pushed back say
that Croatian and Slovenian police have broken their phones and
stolen or damaged their personal belongings. "Immediately after we
crossed into Slovenia," one migrant reported, "we ran into the
police. We attempted to ask for asylum, but they said that this was
not possible. That in Slovenia 'there is no asylum.' They sent us
back to Croatia, where they took away our telephones. The behaved
with us as if we were beasts, even though we were traveling with
children. They threw us into a van and took us to a place near the
Bosnian border." Croatian police have shot into the air to scare
migrants, and have even shot across the border into Bosnia. There
have been cases of travelers being struck by live ammunition.
It is still worse than I've made it sound. Recently one man who
crossed the border with Croatia was apprehended; his shoes were
taken away, and he was forced to walk back to Bosnia in the snow,
thereby suffering frostbite. Dozens, in separate groups, have been
returned to Bosnia and had to be taken to clinics immediately, with
bruises, cuts, and broken bones. And Croatian police have violated
Bosnian sovereignty by driving across the border in vans with
captured migrants and dumping them back in Bosnia. In one of the
most shocking stories, people have reported being arrested,
hancuffed, beaten on their legs and then shaved on one leg, then
burned with a hot metal bar on that leg. The Croatian authorities
deny it all, but the reports are regular and consistent. See below
for a couple of sources on this matter.*
Mistreatment of migrants by Bosnians supervising the camps has been
routine as well. A report from the Border Violence Monitoring group
noted that guards at the camps sometimes take money away from
migrants or accept bribes in order to allow them to find refuge in a
camp.
Then there are Bosnians who are helpful, including some who devote
their lives to trying to make things easier for the travelers. Asim
Latić-Latan, who runs a restaurant in Velika Kladuša,
is one of those. He has provided free dinners to as many as 800
people a day, for over a year. And there's a rare story of a refugee
from Pakistan settling down in USK; Raza Taslim, after traveling
through Turkey and Greece, and after trying to get through Croatia
and beyond several times, opened a restaurant in Bihać. Since then
he has made chicken biryani popular among the locals. He imports the
rice that he cooks from India.
There have been other small inroads of assimilation in the
distraught environment of Bosnia; in USK nearly 200 migrant and
refugee children have been registered in elementary schools. Their
first task is to learn the local language. Dunja, from
Afghanistan—on the road five years—says that this is not a problem,
as she has already become acquainted with six languages since
leaving home. She is trading Urdu lessons with Maja, a ten-year-old
local friend.
The long road for people trying to reach safety seems to reach epic
proportions. Shezad left Pakistan seven years ago, and says that he
was in Turkey, and then Greece, for three years. He misses his wife
and three children back home.
People are coming from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Syria,
Morocco, Algeria, and other countries. Sometimes they are called
"economic refugees," but one man from Bangladesh said, "My life was
in danger. There are big political problems in Bangladesh, and I was
attacked. That is why I left Bangladesh, because of security
problems."
The greatest concentration of migrants is in northwest Bosnia, since
that is the place that is closest to the Croatian border. But there
is a camp on the outskirts of Sarajevo at
Ušivak
and one near Mostar, and there are many refugees in the Tuzla area
as well. In late October it was reported that some 200 people were
arriving in Tuzla each day. Some of them have come through eastern
Herzegovina from Montenegro, passing through the wretched town of
Bileća
in the Republika Srpska, trying to make it to Stolac in the
Federation. There has been trouble in
Bileća,
with reports of burglaries, break-ins, and skirmishes between
migrants and the local Serb population. One migrant was killed
earlier this month, and more recently, local people staged a protest
demonstration to pressure the authorities to control the movements
of the travelers.
Migrants have moved back and forth between Sarajevo, Tuzla, and
Bihać on the bus and train. In an alarming Jim-Crow incident, during
the summer one bus driver in Tuzla demanded that the migrants sit in
the back of the bus, saying, "No one wants to sit with you." Later
the bus company, Transturist, apologized, announcing that the
segregation was the driver's idea, going against company policy, and
that the driver was then fired. Transturist noted that it has helped
travelers extensively over the last year, giving them discounts and
sometimes free transportation, along with allowing them to
congregate and sleep in the bus station yards. I witnessed this to
be true in Tuzla.
As the cold weather closes in on the Bihać area, the situation with
the migrants is coming to a head. The authorities of the region have
been pushing back in two directions: on one hand, they have been
calling on the state-level authorities to take responsibility for
the problem, and on the other, they are threatening to close down
not only the disastrous Vučjak site but the overloaded camps at Bira
and Miral as well. This, after 1,700 additional migrants were shoved
to Vučjak over the weekend in mid-October. Perhaps as a warning,
water was shut off at Vučjak on the same weekend. It is hard to
avoid seeing the parallel between Vučkak's former existence as a
garbage dump and its present one as a human dump.
To inquiries as to where the migrants should go, USK authorities
respond that this question should be directed at the Bosnian
Ministry of Security and the Council of Ministers, which is the
state-level equivalent to the US Cabinet. The USK has suggested that
a camp be set up at Bosanski Petrovac, south of Bihać in the same
canton. But given that the local population there is primarily
composed of local Serbs, the proposal was politicized immediately,
and interpreted as a "demographic attack" on that ethnicity. Serb
nationalist leader Milorad Dodik did not refrain from encouraging
this uproar. Meanwhile, the USK canton police chief suggested that
"the climate in Herzegovina would be more appropriate for surviving
the winter."
IOM contracts with the privately-owned camps in the Bihać area are
expiring in mid-November, and it is up in the air whether they will
be renewed. Meanwhile, officials in Sarajevo have announced that
they will open a second refugee center in that canton, but they ran
into fierce resistance when they suggested a location in the suburb
of Vogošća.
In early
October the French Minister for European Affairs reported that there
are some ten countries in Europe that are prepared to receive
immigrants. This has been visibly illustrated in Germany, which has
recently relaxed its visa requirements in the interest of augmenting
its labor force.
In spite of the alleged readiness of part of the EU to receive
immigrants, chaos reigns in northwestern Bosnia, and it promises to
get worse in the next few weeks. There are people who report having
tried to leave Bosnia as many as twenty times. Facing the oncoming
frigid weather, some of the migrants trapped in the area are
planning to go all the way back to Greece, to start over next
spring.
***
For more detailed information on the Croatian "pushback" actions,
see Illegal Push-Backs And Border Violence
Reports,
September 2019,
and Systemic Pushbacks and Border Violence
Continue in the Balkans,
a report from the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, October
18, 2019
and
BBC Video, October 24, 2019:
Inside Bosnia’s 'nightmare' camp for migrants trying to enter the EU