December 14, 2019

Bosnia’s notorious migrant camp eventually closed; the crisis is still on

topic:	Migration
located:	Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia
editor:	Katarina Panić

Bosnia’s authorities have relocated some 700 migrants from a freezing makeshift camp in north-western Vučjak mountain to the former army barracks outside the capital, Sarajevo. The day after, a group of migrants had returned there from The Game, what they call their attempts to illegally cross the border with Croatia. They found no people, only the excavators demolishing the site in order to prevent people from getting back.

Ever since it was opened last June, the international organisations, human rights activists and volunteers have been appealing its closure because of inhuman conditions. There was no running water, no proper toilets, no permanent electricity, no heating. It was placed on top of a landfill, in an area littered with mines from the 1990s war.

Still, some residents have been trying to stay there because the Croatian border, which is the EU border, is only eight kilometres away. They refused to enter the buses. Apparently, security risk was the reason the media has been banned from entering within three kilometres of the campsite.

The BH Journalists Association and Civil Rights Defenders called upon local authorities as well as the International Organisation for Migrations (IOM) to allow and facilitate media reporting of the deportation of migrants.

Furthermore, the media has no access to two temporary facilities that housed the migrants from Vučjak. The entry is restricted to a limited number of organisations. The activists warn the new places are equally inhuman as the previous one that some journalists qualified as a crime against humanity. Now, they are no longer stuck in the mud – they do have warm beds, food, water and toilets; yet the environment resembles that of a ghetto. 

Over 25,000 migrants passed through Bosnia and Herzegovina this year. Some 8,000 are currently in the country, hoping to get into the EU. Five IOM-run centres can hold up to 5,000 people. The country is in a political impasse since the general elections of October 2018. It has no capacity to deal with the increasing number of migrants after Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia closed their borders to undocumented immigration. As a result of the growing chaos, the Sarajevo Canton police were just forbidden to go on vacation or to take any days off.

“It is all about EU hypocrisy. They (the migrants) come to us from the EU, from Greece, to be precise. And then that very same EU criticises us to do this or not to do that. We should ask the EU to get those people back. We are not capable of taking care of ourselves, especially not of migrants”, a ruling political party leader said a few days ago addressing the youth.

Image: The Organization for World Peace

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