Thousands of migrants are enduring a cold winter in northern Bosnia, unable to make it across the border to the EU. Stranded in Bosnia, they face hostility and attacks from local residents.

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Bosnia risks “severe consequences” to its reputation if assistance is not urgently given to 1,700 people left without shelter for more than three weeks, the European Union’s foreign policy chief has warned.

Authorities in the non-EU country need to “quickly scale up their actions to address the grave humanitarian situation,” the EU’s Josep Borrell told the Serb member of Bosnia’s joint presidency, Milorad Dodik, in a phone call, Mr. Borrell’s spokesman said.

Those authorities should “take full responsibility, urgent action and do what it takes to provide immediate assistance and work on longer-term solutions,” Mr. Borrell told Mr. Dodik.

The blunt words reflected frustration over the slow and minimal action taken so far to help the migrants despite repeated urgings from Brussels and €3.5 million in extra aid for the emergency.

Most of the migrants are from Pakistan and Afghanistan and they include children.

Their original camp, located in the Una Sana area near the border with EU member Croatia, burned down on 23 December.

The Bosnian army has started to put around half the migrants in some 20 tents fitted with heating set up next to the burnt-out camp, with aid groups supplying clothes, blankets, and food.

The other half remain sleeping rough in a nearby forest, waiting for a solution.

Local authorities, however, are refusing to see the camp rebuilt and are resisting entreaties from the UN’s International Organization for Migration for an abandoned factory to be used.

The federal government is not forcing the issue.

The Serb part of the country, represented by Mr. Dodik, refuses to see any migrant camps on its territory, all of which are found in the Bosnian-Croat part.

In his call to Mr. Dodik, Mr. Borrell noted that the EU had “repeatedly urged” Bosnia’s authorities to “provide basic and secure living conditions to all the persons of concern still sleeping out in the cold in extreme conditions”.

He stressed the total €88m in EU aid for migration assistance the country has received, and called for “sustainable solutions, notably with the opening of centres more evenly distributed across the full territory of the country”.

“Failing to do so would have severe consequences for the reputation of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Mr. Borrell said, according to his spokesman.

Source: AFP

Source: https://www.rte.ie/news/europe/2021/0111/1189065-bosnia/

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Dunja Mijatovic, the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner, said in a letter to Bosnian officials that a lack of action and coordination between the country’s multiple governments could have serious effects for migrants and asylum seekers left without housing, food, and medical care.

Ethnically-divided Bosnia has become a transit route for migrants and refugees from Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa since European Union countries shut their borders to new arrivals in 2015. Many have made their way to Bosnia’s northwest hoping to slip into EU member Croatia just to the west.

There are up to 10,000 migrants in Bosnia now, a quarter of whom sleep rough in the woods, abandoned buildings, and by roadsides, keen to move on westwards because Bosnia has few resources to provide them.

In October, the authorities in the northwestern town of Bihac closed its biggest migrant centre and moved hundreds of people to the Lipa camp 50 miles away, which was already full.

The International Organisation for Migration, which oversees all migrant facilities in Bosnia, on Friday stopped funding the Lipa camp because the authorities have failed to ensure the necessary conditions to make it suitable for winter, IOM head Peter Van der Auweraert told N1 television.

He said the government needed to provide an alternative centre for some 1,500 people from the camp, otherwise they would have to join another 1,500 people already sleeping rough.

Bosnia’s authorities cannot agree on where to accommodate the migrants. All migrant facilities are in the autonomous Bosniak-Croat Federation, while the other region, the Serb Republic, refuses to take in any migrants.

The European Union delegation has also urged action amid the coronavirus pandemic to avert a humanitarian crisis.

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Fahrudin Radoncic, the Bosnian security minister, is warning the European Union that there might be up to 100,000 migrants heading to Western Europe through Greece in the coming weeks.

“Our border is very permeable. We don’t have enough (guards) or material resources,” said Radoncic, explaining why Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot serve as a buffer that would stop the influx of migrants.

In the meantime, Greece also paints a grim picture of the situation. As most of the migrants coming to Europe enter the continent in Greece, local government forecasts an increase in newly arrived migrants.

According to Greece’s migration ministry secretary Manos Logothetis, Greece expects about 100,000 new migrants this year as well.

At the end of last year, Hungary also announced that it is preparing for the 100,000 immigrants who are gathering in the Western Balkans and are ready to enter deeper into Europe.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, which could help to stop some of the migrants lacks at least 1,200 border guards to be able to monitor the borders sufficiently, stated Radoncic, adding that currently for every 25 kilometers of the border, there is only one police officer.

Besides, the situation in Bosnian migrant camps is getting so much worse as the camps struggle with enormous overcrowding, reported Austrian tabloid Kronen Zeitung.

An example of the bleak situation is the Vucjak migrant camp near the border with Croatia. Many criticized the camp for unsatisfactory conditions with the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) organization labeling the camp a “dangerous and inhumane place.”

The government decided to clear the camp in December 2019 and transfer the migrants to another area near Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) regional coordinator Peter Van der Auweraert, when the weather in the area gets better, some migrants might get on the move, especially as Bosnia and Herzegovina is just a transit country.

However, other parts of the Balkan route have noticed an increase in activity. In January, for example, 3,400 migrants attempted, some of them violently, to cross the border between Serbia and Hungary despite the border fence.

Source: https://rmx.news/article/article/bosnian-minister-100-000-migrants-on-their-way-to-the-eu

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WIESBADEN – According to German Federal Statistical Office, the number of economic migrants from the Western Balkan countries has risen to 66.000 in 2018. This represents a sharp increase from the same number in 2015, which amounted to 13.000, emphasizes last week’s press release.

Almost a quarter of all people that moved to Germany in 2018 are coming from the region, with citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina making up one third of the total number. They represent 8% of 266.000 people and are only behind workers from India and China.

The explanation for this trend can be found in the fact that, in 2014 and 2015, WB6 were sorted in the group of safe origin countries, which made the entry in Germany on humanitarian basis more difficult. This is why this number has only risen by 7000, Statistical Office explains.

On the other hand, according to the new hiring rules, Western Balkan citizens can get access to the job market under easier conditions by the end of 2020, as long as a concrete job offer exists and employees have not been recipients of asylum services in the past 24 months.

Source: https://europeanwesternbalkans.com/2019/04/23/number-western-balkan-immigrants-germany-sharp-rise/

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It was almost lunchtime at a dormitory on the outskirts of Bihac in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina and an Afghan woman sheltered from the rain in a tent before joining the queue for food.

The dormitory was unfinished. Its windows had no glass, the water pipes leaked and there were holes in the upper floors. The stench of smoke and urine hung in the air.

“This is not a camp, and that is not food,” said the woman, who did not give her name.

Bihac is no stranger to crisis.

Twenty-five years ago this city was under siege, its mainly Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) residents trapped on all sides by Bosnian Serb forces for whom control of Bihac would strengthen supply lines between themselves and their ethnic kin fighting a rebel war just over the border in Croatia.

Yugoslavia was collapsing in bloodshed, and Bihac’s proximity to road and rail communications made it a strategic prize. Today, that location means it is a magnet for migrants and refugees from Asia, Africa and the Middle East carving out a new route through the Balkan peninsula to Western Europe.

For around 1,000, the squalid dormitory and the sodden tents out front are a temporary home, their way forward into European Union member Croatia blocked by police whom rights groups accuse of using heavy-handed tactics to keep them out.

The numbers heading north from Greece via Albania, Montenegro and Bosnia have doubled since last year, with Bosnia now struggling to provide accommodation and food to around 5,000, 3,000 of whom are in Bihac.

The numbers do not compare with 2015, when hundreds of thousands streamed north from Greece through Macedonia and Serbia. But with that route largely shut down, smugglers are hemming closer to the Adriatic.

It has put a particular strain on Bosnia, still in the long process of recovery from a 1992-95 war that killed 100,000 people and left the country divided along ethnic lines.

Memories of suffering:

Improvised shelter in the suburb of Bihac, Borici settlement. Photo: Anja Vladisavljevic

When BIRN visited Bihac, on July 23, the rain did not stop. Clothes and blankets were soaked.

Residents stood in line for their meals, eating in shifts as the dining room, which doubles as sleeping quarters at night, is too small for all of them. That day, the Red Cross served breakfast for 900 and 1,150 hot meals for lunch and dinner. There are just six toilet and shower cabins.

Children played near the road with stray dogs. When the sun comes out, they swim in the emerald waters of the nearby River Una, though even this escape was blighted by tragedy on July 5 when one person drowned.

Their own memories of war and deprivation still fresh, some residents of Bihac and elsewhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been quick to help, organising volunteers and donating food and clothes. But the situation has stirred fear and prejudice in others.

“In the consciousness and narratives of the local population, there are strong associations and comparisons with their own suffering in the war of the 1990s, the experience of being besieged, dying and want,” said culturologist Hajrudin Hromadzic, born in Bihac and now an associate professor at the University of Rijeka in Croatia.

The region, he said, had been thrust into a situation of “spontaneuous coping and experimentation”.

Some 200 were originally housed in a retirement home in the city centre, but were moved to the dormitory on the edge of Bihac on July 17 when mayor Suhret Fazlic said the retirement home was unsafe.

Bosnia has only two official asylum centres. The EU, trying to keep down the flow over its own borders, has pledged to help create another, but Bosnian officials have struggled to agree a location.

Bihac city centre. Photo: Anja Vladisavljevic

Dozens of local councillors and mayors from northwestern Bosnia staged a protest on Thursday in Sarajevo over the state’s handling of the situation.

“They sleep in parks, on benches; they turned our stadium into a toilet, our children have nowhere to play,” said Fazlic.

“We are not against migrants, we understand their problems, but we ask the Council of Ministers to find adequate accommodation and to get them off the streets,” he was quoted as saying by local media.

Hromadzic blamed the country’s “chronic state dysfunction”.

The peace deal that ended the war in Bosnia bestowed a complicated and unwieldy system of ethnic power-sharing that critics say has left government often ineffective and sometimes prone to paralysis.

Whether addressed at the local, cantonal, federal or state level, said Hromadzic, “none of them can find solutions to this delicate challenge.”

Police violence:

Improvised shelter in the suburb of Bihac, Borici settlement. Photo: Anja Vladisavljevic
One thing is for sure. None of the dormitory’s residents want to stay in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There are regular attempts to cross the border into Croatia, but the obstacles are formidable, from forests and rivers, to uncleared landmines and an unwelcoming Croatian police force.

Amnesty International, as well as a number of Croatian non-governmental organisations and media, have documented cases of police using disproportionate force.

BIRN heard similar stories from the refugees and migrants it spoke to. Refusing to be named, they spoke of physical violence, of possessions being confiscated or destroyed and money and cell phones seized.

“My son and I have tried to cross the border several times, but the police are pushing us back,” said an Afghan man, father of a four-year-old boy. During the last such ‘push-back’ they escaped with “only” a broken smartphone, he said.

A Pakistani man, who said he was a student of computer science and architecture, said he had crossed the border five times, even reaching Croatia’s northern neighbour Slovenia. But each time he and his friends were sent back.

Trying to evade police, many swim across rivers. On July 2, Croatia’s interior ministry said that over the last 18 months, 12 had died trying to cross the border into Croatia. Some NGOs give a higher figure of 16, but say they fear the real number is even greater.

On July 19, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Cresecent Societies said that dozens of people were being treated daily for injuries sustained while trying to cross from Bosnia and Herzegovina into Croatia.

Improvised shelter in the suburb of Bihac, Borici settlement. Photo: Anja Vladisavljevic

A Red Cross spokesperson in Bihac, Nicole Robicheau, said conditions near the border were “grossly inadequate”.

“People don’t want to stay here but they are effectively stranded,” Robicheau said in a press release. “Each day, people try to move onwards to Croatia but many return with injuries.”

On Tuesday, Croatian Defence Minister Davor Bozinovic dismissed allegations of police brutality, saying authorities acted only in accordance with Croatian and EU law.

But Julija Kranjec, of the Croatian rights organisations Center for Peace Studies, said a simple denial was not enough in the face of multiple eye-witness accounts given to reputable international organisations.

“If there’s the good technical equipment they go on about so much – drones, thermographic cameras – why not show what’s really going on?” said Kranjec.

Read more:

Bosnians Keep Arguing Over New Migrant Centre

Bosnian Mayors to Protest Against Refugee Centres

Croatia to Release Relative of Killed Refugee Child

Source: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/migrants-and-refugees-find-squalor-in-bosnia-croatia-closed-07-30-2018

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Security and human rights ministers from the Balkans and neighbouring countries agreed at a meeting in Sarajevo on Thursday to create a database which will be compatible with similar systems in Europe in order to track migrants.

“We must be able to see if those people [migrants] previously stayed in Europe,” Bosnian security minister Dragan Mektic told media after the meeting.

“We will see if it is possible for us from the Western Balkans to become part of FRONTEX [the European Border and Coast Guard Agency],” he added.

Mektic explained that migrant readmission agreements between countries must be respected and said it was important to strengthen of state services like the border police.

“We also have to think about the joint return of migrants to third countries or countries of origin, so that each state strengthens the border service and the guards,” he said.

The meeting was attended by representatives of most countries on the so-called Balkan Route – Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Austria and Slovenia.

It involved two panels, one dedicated to security and the other to the humanitarian aspects of the crisis.

Bosnian minister of refugees and displaced persons Semiha Borovac told media that Bosnia has managed to respond adequately to the recent influx of migrants entering the country.

“The priority is the creation of accommodation capacity. We have shown that migrants can get all the necessary assistance,” Borovac said.

Bostjan Sefic, state secretary at Slovenia’s interior ministry, told media that since November 2017, the number of illegal immigrants has been constantly increasing.

“The situation is under control, but it is time for joint activities to ensure that everything is under control. The trend is negative and we must immediately approach the realisation of concrete measures of protection,” Sefic said.

He argued that it would not be good if EU members are forced to adopt unilateral measures and therefore it was essential that countries in the region cooperate to ensure stability.

Bosnia has faced a migrant crisis that peaked in late May after almost 5,000 illegal entries were registered since the beginning of the year.

The International Organisation for Migration, the UN migration agency, also warned on June 1 that migration flows through the Western Balkans are still on the rise.

From January to the end of May, authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Albania registered more than 6,700 new migrants and asylum-seekers, a more than two-fold increase on the 2,600 migrants and asylum-seekers registered in the three countries over the whole of 2017.

Read more:

‘New Balkan Route’ for Migrants, Refugees Causes Alarm

Bosnia Deploys Police to Border to Stop Migrants

Arctic Weather Freezes Migrant Flow Across Bosnia

Source: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/countries-of-the-region-to-work-jointly-on-migrant-crisis-06-07-2018

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