1,300 homeless after the evacuation of the reception center – Politics –



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Lipa refugee camp before evacuation


Lipa refugee camp before evacuation
© APA (AFP)

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) closed the Lipa reception center near the Bosnian city of Bihac on Wednesday. About 1,300 refugees would now be on the streets, Natasa Omerovic, camp coordinator, told the news portal klix.ba. IOM had announced the closure of the camp earlier, because despite the start of winter there was no connection to the electricity grid or water supply.

To “say goodbye,” some of the homeless residents set tents and containers on fire. A thick cloud of black smoke was visible from afar. At the time, the warehouse was almost empty, wrote Peter Van der Auweraert, IOM representative in Bosnia, on Twitter. No one was injured. Fire brigades were able to put out the fire, reported klix.ba.

The Lipa camp is located in an inhospitable area 25 kilometers southeast of Bihac. It was erected in September after the Bosnian authorities successfully closed the Bira camp on the outskirts of Bihac. As a result of this measure, refugees and migrants should disappear from the urban landscape of the city of 60,000 inhabitants in northwestern Bosnia. In an afternoon session of the cantonal parliament, the Bihac authorities also rejected the request of the Bosnian central authorities to house the refugees in an abandoned factory in the city.

The authorities never kept their promise to connect Lipa to electricity and water. Refugee workers criticized the inhumane conditions in the camp. The Austrian organization SOS Balkanroute described it as the “Moria at our doorstep”, alluding to the refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, which caught fire in September.

Due to their proximity to the EU country, Croatia, Bihac and Una-Sana canton are very attractive to refugees and migrants. A branch of the so-called Balkan route runs through Bosnia, through which refugees and migrants try to get from Turkey to Western Europe. The Lipa camp served as a temporary measure to cope with the Covid-19 situation in the summer and was completely unsuitable for the winter conditions. The Greens’ foreign policy spokesperson, Ewa Ernst-Dziedzic, had warned before the Lipa shutdown that this was an “act of cruelty that we can hardly tolerate.”



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