About a thousand migrants are facing unforgiving winter conditions without shelter on Thursday after being forced to return to the burnt-out shell of their former camp in Bosnia.
Around 700 people on Wednesday were sleeping in abandoned shipping containers and in the open in and around the former camp of Lipa, in northwestern Bosnia. They were living in squalid conditions, lacking electricity, water, winter clothes and tents, the humanitarian organizations said.
Located near the border with Croatia, near the town of Bihac, the camp had already been harshly criticised by international officials and aid groups as being inadequate for the needs of those living in it.
Days after the fire, Bosnian authorities have failed to find new accommodations for the refugees at Lipa, leaving nearly 1,000 people out in the cold, with no facilities or heat, eating only meagre food parcels provided by aid groups.
The Lipa camp was abandoned last week after it was deemed unsafe by aid workers. As the migrants left, a fire destroyed most of the tents left behind.
“I have the impression that they wanted to provoke this situation,” Fazlic said of the IOM’s decision to withdraw.
A solution seemed to have been found on Tuesday when Bosnian security minister Selmo Cikotić announced that they would be housed in a former barracks in Bradina, a village in the south of the country. A thousand migrants then boarded buses.
The migrants, mostly from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, were supposed to be relocated to an old military site in the nearby city of Bihac this week, but Bihac’s mayor has refused to accommodate them. The buses that came to transport the migrants to Bihac allowed some to shelter in the vehicles on Tuesday night, but left Lipa empty the next day.
For days, local and international actors have been talking about a “humanitarian disaster” at the camp. They also note that it was foreseeable but they blame each other.
Since April, Lipa had been hosting more than a thousand people but was deemed unsuitable for winter. Consisting of large tents, the camp was never connected to the electricity grid and had no running water.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which manages the site with other NGOs, decided to withdraw its teams for this reason and is calling on the authorities to reopen the reception center in Bira, in the neighboring town of Bihac.
This center, located in a disused factory, had been closed at the beginning of October, just before the municipal elections, under pressure from the inhabitants.
It was an election promise that Mayor Suhret Fazlic is determined to keep: “We will not allow them to return. It’s about our safety,” he repeats over and over again.
He joined dozens of residents gathered in front of the site to prevent any return of migrants on Wednesday evening.
According to Peter Van der Auweraert, head of the IOM in the country. Nearly 6,000 of them live in reception centers, while “between 2,500 and 3,000 have no shelter”.
Large numbers of migrants are squatting in abandoned buildings and houses and regularly try to cross into Croatia, an EU member state which regularly refuses them entry from Bosnia.
The EU has provided Bosnia with some 85.5 million euros since 2018 to help it cope with migration.
Husein Kavazović, the Grand Mufti in Bosnia, half of whose 3.5 million inhabitants are Muslims, denounced the “unacceptable treatment” of migrants.
“The inhuman and humiliating treatment of these people is a shame for Bosnia, but also for Europe,” he said.
