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“We live like animals. In fact, worse. If nobody helps us, we will die.” The desperate cry of Kasim, a Pakistani, comes from the hell of Lipa. This battered and makeshift tent city is the refugee camp that caught fire last week, two days before Christmas, some thirty kilometers from Bihac, northern Bosnia-Herzegovina. Now almost a thousand people sleep in the forest, in the cold, without food or water. Or in the only tent left in the camp, unsafe. Built in April to deal with the Covid emergency, managed by the IOM (the international organization for migration), it was supposed to accommodate a thousand people, even if there were at least 500 more inside. Several times the IOM had asked the local authorities to equip it for winter: without water and electricity, you cannot survive the frosts these days, when temperatures drop below zero and it starts to snow.
“The Lipa camp was an ill-born camp. Four sleeping tents, in rubber, each with 120 bunk beds. Plus another tent that served as a refectory and some chemical toilets. with the first snow. The water began to freeze “, he says Republic Silvia Maraone, project coordinator along the route from the Balkans to Ipsia, an NGO active in Bosnia for 25 years and working in the refugee camps of the Balkan country since 2018.
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Several times in recent months, IOM had given a deadline to close the field quickly stopped for emergency. On the morning of December 23, it was supposed to be the final evacuation, but at 11 a.m. one of the dormitory tents caught fire. “There are two versions of the fire: some say it was IOM, some some migrants. The fact is that these people now have nowhere to go. The fields in Sarajevo are overcrowded. Who tried to go to Bihac on foot was blocked and returned by the police. Every day the Red Cross distributes food, but it is not enough, “Maraone continues.
The desperate people of Lipa are very young, between 23 and 25 years old. And even some minor ones are easy to find in the middle of the mountains, on this plateau just above a thousand meters where the cold Balkan winds blow mercilessly. They come mainly from Afghanistan and Pakistan. “They ask for food, clothes, sleeping bags and tents. People need everything. It is a humanitarian disaster,” Maraone continues.
Some, after the fire, went to try what they call “the game“,” the game “: to reach Croatia. And therefore to Europe. But they do not have the police: once they reach the border they are captured, often beaten, stripped of what little they bring with them, returned and abandoned in the mountains in the middle of the forest or on the banks of a river.
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While awaiting accommodation, the migrants were able to return to the Bira camp in Una Sana canton, two thousand places, the largest in all of Bosnia until it was closed by the region’s authorities on September 30. But for weeks the neighbors have been organizing pickets in front of the camp: they do not want to take on this “burden.” Today in Sarajevo, in an extraordinary meeting between the central and local governments, they will try to reach a solution. “It is the abyss of humanity. There is so much blindness on the part of local institutions. People who were refugees and were fleeing the war 25 years ago, today they do not recognize these people who are freezing to death.” have passed. Indescribable violence, “says Maraone.
Bosnia has become the bottleneck on a Balkan migration route for those trying to reach Europe from Asia. Officially closed by the EU in 2016, almost 70,000 desperate people – refugees, migrants and asylum seekers – have already registered in the country in the last two years. Of the approximately 9,000 people currently living in Bosnia, only 6,000 are in the camps. Everyone else sleeps in the open air, in the ruined and war-abandoned buildings and factories in the former Yugoslavia. It is the invisible and forgotten route. “It is the abyss of humanity.”
