Friday, March 29, 2024 | Ramadan 18, 1445 H
clear sky
weather
OMAN
25°C / 25°C
EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Bosnian town left alone to deal with thousands of desperate migrants

1316164
1316164
minus
plus

BIHAC: In camp Vucjak, 700 migrants sleep under canvas tents on mattresses that lay directly on the ground of the former garbage dump and wait in long queues for two meagre meals a day. The camp is near Bihac, a town on Bosnia’s border with EU-member Croatia, an area where some 7,000 migrants are stranded on their dangerous attempt to reach wealthier parts of Europe. The town found itself straddling the latest branch of the Balkan migration route, forged after borders were hardened on the journey that runs from Serbia to Hungary and Croatia.


Camp Vucjak is the response by the town and the northern Una-Sana region of Bosnia to a crisis nearly everybody else ignores. “It was dropped on a small organisation, the Bihac Red Cross, to take care of all these people,” the head of the branch Selam Midzic said. “It takes a heroic effort to run the camp with five people and provide 1,400 meals each day.” Midzic said that the canton — a regional administrative unit in Bosnia — receives help neither from the government nor the international community, only from non-governmental organisations.


“The Bosnian government is uninvolved and has not provided locations for a permanent camp,” Midzic said. “The European Commission refuses to recognise Vucjak as a formal camp and is not providing any assistance, aggravating the already huge problem.” Dirk Plannert, a 52-year-old German photographer, journalist and activist, agrees. He had helped with humanitarian transports to Bihac when it was enclosed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war and is now running a medical tent in the camp. “Someone decided to simply throw away 1,000 people,” he said.


In the camp, the lack of funding is visible. The toilets are filthy and nourishment is thin. But outside the camp it is worse. Thousands squat in derelict factories and abandoned houses or simply sleep in the streets. In several sites right on the border, people live in the open, mountainous terrain, waiting for a chance to sneak into Croatia. There, their ordeal may go up by a magnitude. Croatian police closely monitor the closed border zone. After that, there are patrols and checkpoints along the entire 120-kilometre route to the next country, Slovenia. — DPA


SHARE ARTICLE
arrow up
home icon