“we Defend our city!”. The refugees of yesterday against the refugees of today. The people who was displaced and who now use the blackjack. In the frost of the end of the year, in the glacial indifference that the Covid is lower on any other global emergency, to the ports of Europe, there is a problem with migrants is turning into a war among the poor, but in a “real humanitarian catastrophe”, — says the Un — that no one knows face: at least three thousand middle eastern, north african, asian to days roam in slippers to twenty below zero for the forests of Bosnia in the north-west, on the border with Croatia, arrived along the Balkan route and left without a field in which to seek refuge and rejected by the border guards of Croatian and finally rejected by bosnian citizens of Bihac. You do not want them to host. Who patrol the old abandoned factory of Bira, where he tried to find a refuge.
“we Defend our city!” the battle cry launched on Facebook by a group of “patriots” among thousands of followers and likes, between politicians and the local media which describe the intruders as criminals, terrorists, disease carriers. From Sarajevo, the government lets herself go and turns away, although he has received 60 million in the Eu (most other 25 on arrival) just to stop this disaster migration. Only the Unhcr and the Iom, the world organizations for refugees and migrants, have broken the silence with a very harsh words: “it’s Snowing, we are below zero, there is no heating, nothing,” he tweeted impatiently the person responsible for the Iom to Bosnia, Peter Van der Auweraert, now at the end of the mandate. “That’s not the way they should live people. Need political courage and action. Now.”
The case explodes now because last Saturday, to the news that their tent cities of Lipa, would have been closed, the desperate they set fire to the field. But no one can be said to be surprised by what is happening: for months, many ngos denounce the conditions of Lipa, 30 kilometers from Bihac, a temporary camp in the middle of nowhere, planted in April to cope with the pandemic. The curtains had to sbaraccare in September, but no one has done much about it, for fear of the protests of the inhabitants of the region.
And on the 9th of December, when the Iom has decided not to finance a field that is so inappropriate for the winter, agreeing with the local authority accommodation in the containers of Bira, the crisis is precipitated: 400 migrants have taken their four things, and have tried to enter in Croatia, as usual, rejected by the police in Zagreb with ways rough (there are numerous allegations of violence); someone exasperated, he set fire to the tents; all the others were left to wander in the snowy woods. Frozen, in a Country petrified. The feet were purple, high fever, a few blankets, some meal provided by the red Cross in the bosnian: “we Live like animals,” he said to the microphones of tv, Kasim, a young pakistani. “In fact, the animals live better than us. If you do not help us, we are going to die. Please, help us!”.
do Not say that you never knew. The Balkans are the area of Europe with the greatest concentration of international organisations, military and humanitarian, but when you have closed the route Turkey-Greece-Macedonia-Serbia-Bosnia, migrations have been going on and not much has been done: only from 2018, the government of Sarajevo has had to handle 60 thousand refugees and it now has a 6,500-fields, crumbling, in addition to these three thousand for a walk. Croatia has raised an invisible wall, sixty rejections per day, and a dossier presented last week to Eu commissioner for home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, records 12.654 abuses suffered by the migrants ended up in the hands of the mafias or to the (often corrupt) police in the balkans.
Have been documented by Amnesty International authentic cases of torture: refugees kidnapped in exchange for ransom, a fire brand on the arms and title of the payment. More than two years, there is a courageous school teacher at bosnian of Bihac, Zehida Bihorac, which in total solitude brings medicines, clothing, food, and tells on social that they suffer the migrants in the Krajina, at the bottom of those 1,600 kilometres of journey, of fear, of hunger, of torture that lead them to Lesvos at the borders of Europe. Zehida has received threats, has asked you (often unnecessarily) the protection of the police and his case, like that of all the volunteers bosnians that help immigrants, has pushed even the United Nations in protest, asking for an investigation on the violence xenophobic.
All of this 25 years old from Dayton. And by those peace agreements in December 1995 they liberated the same bosnian war, the genocide, the refugee camps in which they had been driven out, from the nightmare of having to wander in search of a better fate. Never, you said at the time. In this quarter of a century, Bosnia and Herzegovina is revealed to be little more than a geographical expression, frozen in a peace that is empty and cold. Bosgnacchi, serbs and croats, pretending to be united, but are divided on everything. Except on one thing: it does not want the migrants.
