This essay is the fourth instalment in a multi-part series exploring shifting geographies of enclosure and mobility for refugees in the Balkan region.
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e return to this region at the end of July 2018. As we feared, in the past few months the situation has become significantly worse for the refugees, with apparently up to 5000 people accommodated in makeshift camps and squatted buildings between Velika Kladuša and Bihać. However, despite this surge in numbers and the related humanitarian needs, there is still no official hospitality camp or reception centre established by the authorities. In Bihać, we visit the infamous ‘student dormitory’, a building that was initiated but never completed and thus abandoned (see Fig. 3). We enter the building and, like 18 months earlier in the warehouse makeshift camp in Belgrade, we immediately perceive the unhealthy living condition of the hundreds of men and women in its interior. Everything is humid, there are no windows, just open walls, the building basically consists of a skeleton made of cement and broken materials; the smoke is intense in some of the ‘rooms’ occupied by tents, since people cook their food despite the provision of daily meals by the Red Cross just outside the building. The living conditions are truly dire, and one can only imagine how these may quickly deteriorate with the arrival of the cold season (Fig. 4). We walk among blankets, backpacks, sleeping bags, tents, clothes of any kind, pots and pans, toys, old shoes… it is not clear what is still in use, what has been abandoned… we are confronted with a landscape of precarity and extreme vulnerability that we have encountered in many other sites along the Balkan route.
A campground of sorts has developed in the park in front of the building, with hundreds of tents inhabited also by families with young children. A couple of police officers in their car monitors the whole scene from the distance by standing at the beginning of the path that takes to the building. Despite all these conditions, a sort of ordinary life, the ordinary life of people-on-the-move, continues inside and around this derelict building, while the refugees insist with us that “they will get to Europe” one day, despite the harsh measure implemented by the Croatian border police of late. Again, like in Belgrade few months ago, we are in a sort of city inside the city, an enclave made of provisional and precarious material arrangements, and by a population that is extremely vulnerable but at the same time moved by the irresistible desire to go north, to end a journey started in some cases months before.
We decide to move to Velika Kladuša where the refugees are not visible in the urban park near the mosque anymore. They are not even in the bar on the main square. We are told that they have been removed from the centre of town and are now living in a makeshift camp somewhere in the fields. After a few minutes we identify a cleared area in the fields behind an abandoned factory squatted by a few young men. We see the first tents made of grey plastic sheets, a makeshift shower, a few mobile bathroom installations, abandoned garbage and people waiting in the shade for something to happen (Figures 6a and 6b). An electric generator provides some energy and the possibility of recharging the mobile phones, an indispensable tool to engage with the new geographies of informal mobility along the Route.
While entering the camp, we talk to other refugees, newcomers walking with their luggage – in this case proper suitcases as if they were at the airport – towards this new makeshift village; they are all from Iran, and they seem to know where to go and who to meet. At the entrance of the new jungle, a small bridge over an irrigation canal connects the camp to other fields and, it seems, the forest. We are few kilometres away from the border. A car of the local police stands past the bridge; the police officers in the car show no interest for these new arrivals and for those who are waiting for them… The emergence of this new jungle seems the result of a tacit agreement between a growing population of refugees who use Bosnia-Herzegovina as a bridging country to go north and the authorities who do not have established sufficient formal structures of hospitality or humanitarian support, officially because of lack of funding, but also because of their undeclared hope to see these migrants disappear as soon as possible.
This corner of Bosnia is now a key passage in the informal geographies that make the Balkan Route, a route that is at the origin of important political change in the countries of a region that has experienced in the past few years the raise of populism and of multiple walls… The Balkan Route, despite all, is still alive, and the life in these makeshift spaces is the confirmation that it is not going to die any time soon…
According to our interviews and the few available reports from humanitarian organisations and journalists who have investigated this situation thus far, the majority of the refugees inhabiting the makeshift camps in the two enclaves described above intend to cross Slovenia and Croatia, enter Italy in Trieste, and then continue towards northern Europe (Palladino, 2018). The data provided by IOM and UNHCR state that most of the refugees stranded in Bosnia-Herzegovina comes from Pakistan (31%), Syria (17%), Afghanistan (13%), Iran (12%) e Iraq (9%) (IOM, 2018: 42).
As we write, the reception capacity of the country is extremely limited compared to the number of refugees, who often arrive exhausted and in need of medical support after long and dangerous journeys. Salakovac, near Mostar, is where the only official reception centre is located, capable of accommodating no more than 300 guests. In Vogošći, near Sarajevo, a small private structure is operated by the youth humanitarian organisation ‘Tempo’ with only 150 beds, where the first refugees entering the country in the past winter were accommodated. Also the Asylum Centre in Delijaš, in the Trnovo municipality (about 40km from the capital), has been operating in full regime with the little more than 100 beds available (RAS, 2018: 5; Service for Foreigner’s Affaires, 2018: 4).
In Bihać the situation is no better: here as well the support to the refugees is based almost entirely on the humanitarian intervention of volunteers and of the Bosnian Red Cross, despite the continued increase in arrivals and the coming of the winter. After being allowed to stay in the decaying Dom Penzionera (the former Home of the Retirees) in July 2018, the refugees have been moved by the authorities to the ruins of a building made available by the municipality, a building originally meant to become the Ðački Dom (the Student Dormitory) (N1, 2018b). Located on a hill just outside the centre of Bihać, the building is in very poor condition: the roof is seriously damaged, there are no doors, some of the external walls are missing, and there is no running water or bathroom facilities. This former dormitory is now intensively populated by individuals and families who sleep on the floor, or in tents picked up inside the building, while at times blanket or sheets are used to separate some of these spaces and simulate the existence of private rooms, especially in the areas inhabited by women or by families [see Fig. 4]. It is difficult to imagine a more unfriendly and vulnerable way of dwelling in an abandoned building.
In front of the building is a makeshift camp made of improvised tents and other forms of arranged dwellings named the ‘Borići camp’. In August, according to the Red Cross local branch, which provides daily meals to this improvised community, the ‘Dom’ hosted anything between 800 and 1000 people. Medecins sans Frontiers is also present and offers some basic medical assistance in collaboration with the local Hospital, while the IOM has installed some chemical mobile toilets and six containers with showers. These official operators are complemented by the support of some local humanitarian organisations, but no official state intervention was found when we visited this ‘new makeshift city in the city’. This is a situation that somehow recalls Speer’s concept of “tent ward” (2018: 163), since it features the dualistic function of a semi-sanctioned encampment as a designated space of refugee (very limited) welfare, but also of surveillance and isolation; a site, in other words, characterised by a combination of (precarious and just tolerated) care provision but also relative abandonment.
As argued by Davies and Isakjee, with reference to the Jungle in Calais, some of these makeshift arrangements reveal the “hidden violence of abandonment” (Davies & Polese, 2015: 38) that is silently perpetrated by the authorities: “[T]he violence wrought on migrants in Europe starkly recalls Mbembe’s (2003) notion of the violence of ‘letting die’ – a situation in which individuals are not activity made to die, as in the case of genocide (Gilbert & Ponder, 2014), but are suffering a violent abandonment through political neglect. As a result, migrants and refugees who are forced to navigate the labyrinth of camps as they journey throughout Europe are exposed to conditions that consign ‘large numbers of people to lead short and limited lives’ (Li, 2010, 3)” (Davie and Isakjee, 2015: 2).
Let us return to Bihać. At the end of July, in consideration of the dire living conditions in these new, somehow regulated, jungles, about a hundred people considered the most vulnerable (mainly families with young children, or ill minors) were transferred to the hotel ‘Sedra’ in Ostrožac, not far from the town of Cazin (Ahmadi and Purić, 2018). As we write, it is not clear how many refugees live around Bihać and its makeshift dwellings (we noted for example that some other abandoned buildings have been quietly occupied by a few families); the local authorities estimate that the number oscillates between 3000 and 4000, although some interviewees have informally declared that the figures are possibly much higher.
Half of the refugees apparently have the means to pay for private accommodations – another confirmation that this has become a consolidated refugee route along which services of different kind are offered to the refugees to support their journeys – despite the fact that residents are forbidden to host the refugees. These refugees are thus beyond the control of the authorities and are difficult to quantify. What is certain, though, is that most of this specific group of individuals and families stop very briefly in Bihać, since they have the means to use what is clearly a very active network of smugglers who help them to go through the mountains, possibly avoiding the numerous mines that still disseminate the forests of this region, a dark and dangerous legacy of the intestine war that brought the dissolution of the former Republic of Yugoslavia about two decades ago. Many other refugees, we were told, are camping outside the city, in abandoned rural houses or in the forest, having created a sort of extensive jungle in constant movement along the border with Croatia.
After the report penned by Shaun Walker for ‘The Guardian’ on 15th August 2018 (Walker, 2018), the international media began to show interest in this new front of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe, paying particular attention to the episodes of violence perpetrated by the Croatian police against the refugees and repeatedly reported by the humanitarian organisations involved in the region (see The Guardian, 2018). The humanitarian emergency related to the presence of thousands of people living in precarious and makeshift dwellings has also drawn some attention and has forced the national authorities to take action.
For months the national government, in consultation with the local authorities, has looked for adequate structures to be converted into proper hospitality centres capable of providing humanitarian aid to the refugees, but until recently all the proposals were met with resistance by the municipalities where the identified sites were located or, more generally, by the lack of the funds necessary to restructure the abandoned factories or military barracks that were available. Recently, the European Commission has released 6m euros to Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to facilitate the conversion of some buildings into proper asylum seekers centres and implement a system of identification and registration of the refugees, but also in order to enforce tighter control over the country’s borders (European Commission, 2018).
In parallel, other geopolitical interventions were aimed at affecting the recent developments along this route: in order to block the irregular crossing of the borders, the Montenegro government since mid-August has decided to use the military forces, particularly in the area around the southern city of Bozaj, to patrol the border with Albania. In addition, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, known for his fierce anti-migrant stance in the region (and for the first wall erected on the border with Serbia to stop the refugees along the Western Balkan Route in the Fall 2015), during a recent state visit in the capital Podgorica offered direct help to Montenegro in patrolling the border and in stopping the irregular passages of the migrants arriving from South (Timović, 2018a, 2018b).
Claudio Minca is Professor and Head of the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His current research centers on the relationship between space and biopolitics, with a particular focus on the archipelago of refugee camps in the Balkan region. His most recent books are On Schmitt and Space (2015, with R. Rowan), Hitler’s Geographies (2016, with P. Giaccaria), Moroccan Dreams (2016, with L. Wagner), After Heritage (2018, with H. Muzaini) and Camps Revisited (2019, with I. Katz and D. Martin).
Dragan Umek is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Trieste. His research interest centres on historical cartography, human and cultural geography with a particular focus on the Balkans. He has extensively investigated the "return and relocation" of refugees in former Yugoslavia and, more recently, the migration flows along the "Balkan Route" and the widespread hospitality for asylum seekers and refugees in Italy.
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