This essay is the fifth and final installment in a multi-part series exploring shifting geographies of enclosure and mobility for refugees in the Balkan region.
“Migrants: clashes at the Bosnian-Croatian border”
(direct quotes from Stefano Giantin’s report for Il Piccolo, on October 25th, 2018):
Families with children sleeping outdoor for days and days, long lines of people walking along desolate roads, tens of people blocked on a train, minor physical clashes with the police while trying to breach the border control and enter the EU. The situation in Bosnia of thousands of migrants arriving along the new Balkan Route […] to Croatia is getting worse and worse, with an escalation of the tension at the border. Two main points of conflict [emerged]… The first is at small border passage of Maljevac [near Velika Kladuša], where about a hundred refugees has tried to cross irregularly the border, breaking through the first barrier made by the Bosnian police. The second barrier, formed by anti-riot squads, has somehow blocked this attempt, while the border has been officially closed since the morning. During the clashes the migrants were screaming “open the border!”. In the end, there were a few injured people on both sides, due to the stones thrown against the Croatian police, but also to the batons and the smoke bombs used against the refugees.
On the other side of the border, Zagreb has sent new police forces, a helicopter, and has erected a temporary material barrier. However, the migrants, about 250, including families and children, many of whom have spent the night at the border during the past few nights, remained on the site despite the clashes, picking up their tents in the no-man’s-land.
The situation is very tense in Bihać as well, the second epicentre of the crisis, where about 2-3000 migrants have been waiting for months for the opportunity to enter Croatia and where, in the past weeks, manifestations of protest on the part of the local residents have taken place to remind the authorities not to leave the city alone in dealing with this dramatic situation. […] From Sarajevo, other refugees have just tried to reach Bihać by train. At the Izačić border passage, near Bihać, about 200 refugees have been sleeping outdoor waiting to go through.[…] doubts remain about how many refugees are now present in Bosnia. The most credible estimations describe about 5,000 refugees, while 19,000 have entered the country since the beginning of the year, […] of which over 13,000 have been pushed back at the border.
This snapshot is a confirmation of how the new Balkan Route may be subject in the coming weeks to events that are not yet taken into consideration in this essay. Having said that, we would like to conclude with a few, brief general considerations on how refugee camps, also makeshift camps like the ones discussed here, “are geopolitical formations and are in no way immune or irrelevant to geopolitics, whether regional or international” (Hyndman, 2011: 8).
The fierce response of the Croatian border police, complemented by the tolerant politics of the Bosnian authorities, similar in some ways to the one employed by the Serbian authorities in the past few years (see, Šantić et al., 2017), speaks volumes, illustrating how irregular migrations are a key battleground concerning the often conflicting geopolitical negotiations across the European continent and in particular in relation to the EU. In other words, Bosnia-Herzegovina is doing very little since it is possibly expecting generous support through EU funds in order to address the situation from both a ‘security’ and a humanitarian perspective, in this way becoming a potentially relevant player in a broader region affected by a new impending ‘refugee crisis’.
Croatia, on the other hand, prefers to act tough against these irregular mobilities and to mark its geopolitical agenda, literally, on the bodies of the refugees (on the biopolitical reconceptualization of the border, see Vaughan-Williams, 2015a). In this way, it may be able to prove to the European authorities that it is a reliable member of the EU in managing the alleged refugee crisis and that it deserves to be admitted to the European common space as defined by the Schengen agreement. Italy, and in particular the local government in Trieste, acts geopolitically by spectacularising the ‘refugee problem’ (without really looking for a definitive solution) while the most recent reports of pushbacks from the Trieste border (Barbacetto, 2018) seem, in a subtle way, to renegotiate the role played by the country within the regulatory spaces of the Dublin agreement.
Hyndman might identify the processes here described as a true “geopoliticization of human life” (2011: 14), since a post-WWII human rights-based regime of global governance “has largely been supplanted by concepts like ‘human security’, practiced as selective security” directed on the bodies of the refugees (see (Vaughan-Williams, 2012; 2015b).What we witness in these days along this route, and on that border in particular, has been described by Van Houtum (2010, pp. 961) as the implementation of “a hegemonic buffer zone geopolitics, the installation of a cordon sanitaire. So, to the world the EU shows a Janus-face, one face of development aid and humanitarian assistance and another of a security-obsessed economic and cultural comfort zone”. Van Houtum (2010: 960) also suggests that this process is a way of “making of borders via the making of others, othering”, with the consequence of producing a population of unwanted, redundant people, of wasted lives, to speak with Bauman (2004 in Van Houtum, 2010: 964).
The emergence and the management - or the deliberate lack of management – of the new Balkan Route can thus be seen as part of a broader geopolitics of containment of informal refugee mobilities, according to which, explains Tazzioli (2018: 16), “migrants are governed through heterogeneous spatialities of migration control that involve, for instance, control over migrant routes, the spaces produced by EU’s bilateral agreements with third-countries and deportation routes” and in which “temporal borders are reassembled for regaining control over unruly mobility.”
The border geopolitics at play in the case of the refugee Balkan Routes is thus also part of the externalization agenda of the refugee problem on the part of the European Commission, whose principal architects “aimed to provide a space that enhanced refugee protection ‘in the region’, but simultaneously limited access to protection on European soil” (Hyndman, 2011: 12). By implementing such a protectionist and highly selective immigration policy – insists Van Houtum (2010: 967) – “the EU has come to resemble a gated community in which the biopolitical control and management of immigration is, to a large extent, the product of fear.”
The broader geopolitics of these refugee informal corridors operates at different scales (see, again, Vaughan-Williams, 2012; also, 2015b). On the one hand, it is related to the ‘grand spaces’ typical of the geopolitical jargon of the nation states and according to which the refugee informal mobilities are all too often read in cartographic terms – as a ‘flux’ of anonymised individuals across borders and regions to be shown on the contemporary maps of Europe. On the other, it is related to the scale of the makeshift camps and to the actual mobilities and living conditions of thousands of individuals, of real people, of real scars on their bodies, of squatted buildings, poor food, and medical needs, but also of barbed wire. The grand cartographies of the state authorities and the lives and the mobilities related to the makeshift camps clearly influence each other and crucially contribute to determine the new geographies or informal mobility in this part of Europe.
We have emphasized the scale of the makeshift camps and their informal routings in this paper as this is where manifestations of a sort of ‘geopolitics from below’ may be found. The unruly makeshift spatialities emerging in that northern corner of Bosnia-Herzegovina are not only extremely fluid, but they represent, precisely because of that fluidity, sites where the refugees can enact their political agency by openly resisting the official state border politics but also by invisibly engaging with the networks of smugglers and actually crossing those same (closed) borders.
“It is for this reason” – argues Rygiel (2007) – “that it is so important to investigate camp spaces like ‘the jungle’ not as simply spaces of exceptionality and bare life but as spaces of politics in their own right.” However, these camps remain spaces of extreme precarity and very poor living conditions, where the “migrants are at risk of violence, trafficking, and other abusive practices […] including injury, trauma, exploitation, and dispossession” [Mandić, 2018: 2]. This is why they deserve particular attention and their informal geographies need to be discussed and taken in to account as powerful counter narratives to the official state and media rhetoric that objectifies (read:dehumanizes) the so-called permanent ‘refugee crisis’.
As we write, more alarming accounts describe an increasingly dramatic situation, with over 10,000 people waiting to enter Croatia. On October 29th, reports (Manzin, 2018) confirmed that the border in Maljevac was still closed, with a makeshift camp of about 200 people in the no-man’s-land, some of which have started a hunger strike. This makeshift camp was receiving basically no humanitarian support, despite the fact that it included women, children and elderly people, while the temperature overnight was often below zero. Some of the refugees have apparently covered their mouths with tape. Reports concerning the violence perpetrated by the Croatian policy on the refugees have begun to emerge in the global media. International media attention to the most recent events resulted in the decision, on the part of the Bosnian authorities, to evict the 1100 refugees living in the Bihać student house and in the adjacent makeshift camp to the former freezers factory ‘Bira’, provisionally provided with tents and containers. For the people dwelling and resisting in their tents in no man’s land, however, as we write, no permanent solution has been found as yet…
On the same border, but moving in the opposite direction, cars with Slovenian plates line up every Friday to bring their Bosnian (regular and irregular) workers back home to their families, another manifestation of a semi-regular form of mobility in that corner of the Balkans. An ordinary day under the European sky. Two different informal corridors converge on the same border, true manifestations of a geography made of hierarchies and highly differentiated rights to move: again, a process of “othering as a way of making the border,” of bordering Europe (Vaughan-Williams, 2015b).
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