December 6, 2019 – Foreign Policy

Croatia Is Abusing Migrants While the EU Turns a Blind Eye

The evidence of Croatian police violence toward migrants is overwhelming, but Brussels continues to praise and fund Zagreb for patrolling the European Union’s longest external land border.

BIHAC, Bosnia and Herzegovina—Cocooned in a mud-spattered blanket, thousands of euros in debt, and with a body battered and bruised, Faisal Abas has reached the end of the line, geographically and spiritually. A year after leaving Pakistan to seek greener pastures in Europe, his dreams have died in a rain-sodden landfill site in northern Bosnia. His latest violent expulsion from Croatia was the final straw.

“We were just a few kilometers over the border when we were caught on the mountainside. They wore black uniforms and balaclavas and beat us one by one with steel sticks,” he recalled. “I dropped to the ground and they kicked me in the belly. Now, I can’t walk.”

Faisal rolled up his trousers to reveal several purple bruises snaking up his shins and thighs. He has begun seeking information on how to repatriate himself. “If I die here, then who will help my family back home?” he said.

The tented wasteland outside the Bosnian city of Bihac has become a dumping ground for single male migrants that the struggling authorities have no room to accommodate and don’t want hanging around the city. Bhangra music blasts out of a tinny speaker, putrid smoke billows from fires lit inside moldy tents, and men traipse in flip-flops into the surrounding woods to defecate, cut off from any running water or sanitation.

A former landfill, ringed by land mines from the Yugoslav wars, the hamlet of Vucjak has become the latest squalid purgatory for Europe’s largely forgotten migrant crisis as thousands escaping war and poverty use it as a base camp to cross over the Croatian border—a process wryly nicknamed “the game.”

The game’s unsuccessful players have dark stories to tell. A young Pakistani named Ajaz recently expelled from Croatia sips soup from a plastic bowl and picks at his split eyebrow. “They told us to undress and we were without shoes, socks, or jackets. They took our money, mobiles and bags with everything inside it, made a fire and burnt them all in front of us. Then they hit me in the eye with a steel stick,” he said. “They beat everyone, they didn’t see us as humans.”

Mohammad, sitting beside his compatriot, pipes up: “Last week we were with two Arabic girls when the Croatian police caught us. The girls shouted to them ‘sorry, we won’t come back,’ but they didn’t listen, they beat them on their back and chest with sticks.”

Down the hill in Bihac, in a drafty former refrigerator factory turned refugee facility, a metal container serves as a quarantine area for the infectious and infirm. Mohammad Bilal, a scrawny 16-year-old, lies on a lower bunk with his entire leg draped in flimsy bandage. Three weeks ago, at the cusp of winning the game and crossing into Italy, he was seized in Slovenia and then handed back to Croatia. That’s when the violence began.

“They drove us in a van to the Bosnian border and took us out one at a time,” he said, describing the Croatian police. “There were eight police, and one by one they beat us, punching, kicking, hitting with steel sticks. They broke my leg.”

A nearby Bosnian camp guard grimaced and wondered out loud: “Imagine how hard you have to hit someone to break a bone.”

Among the fluctuating migrant population of 7,000 thought to be in the area, vivid descriptions of violent episodes are being retold every day. The allegations have been mounting over the last two years, since Bosnia became a new branch in the treacherous Balkan migratory route into Europe. Denunciations of Croatian border policy have come from Amnesty International, the Council of Europe, Human Rights Watch, and a United Nations special rapporteur. Officials in Serbia have even alleged “physical and psychological torture” by Croatia’s police forces.

In November 2018, the Guardian published a video shot by a migrant in which haunting screams can be heard before a group of migrants emerge from the darkness wild-eyed and bloodied. A month later, activists secretly filmed Croatian police marching lines of migrants back into Bosnian territory.

Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic even appeared to let the cat out of the bag in an interview with the Swiss broadcaster Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, during which she remarked that “a little bit of force is needed when doing pushbacks.” Despite the videos showing injured migrants, explicit video evidence of Croatian officials carrying out actual beatings has never been seen, and migrants report that one of the first commands by border guards is to surrender mobile phones, which are then either taken or destroyed before a thorough search is performed.

The abuse appears to be rampant. Both the violence and humiliation—migrants are often forced to undress and walk back across the border to Bosnia half-naked for several hours in freezing temperatures—seem to be used as a deterrent to stop them from returning. And yet the European Union is arguably not only facilitating but rewarding brute force by a member state in the name of protecting its longest land border.

In December 2018, the European Commission announced that it was awarding 6.8 million euros to Croatia to “strengthen border surveillance and law enforcement capacity,” including a “monitoring mechanism” to ensure that border measures are “proportionate and are in full compliance with fundamental rights and EU asylum laws.”

According to European Commission sources, a sum of 300,000 euros was earmarked for the mechanism, but they could not assess its outcome until Croatia files a report due in early 2020. Details of oversight remain vague. A spokesperson for the United Nations refugee agency in Croatia told Foreign Policy that the agency has no involvement. The Croatian Law Center, another major nongovernmental organization, also confirmed it has no role in the mechanism. It appears to be little more than a fig leaf.

►https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/06/croatia-is-abusing-migrants-while-the-eu-turns-a-blind-eye
#Slovénie

AYS Special 2019/2020: A Year of Violence — Monitoring Pushbacks on the Balkan Route

In 2019, The Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) shared the voices of thousands of people pushed back from borders on the Balkan Route. Each tells their own tale of illegal, and regularly violent, police actions. Each represents a person denied their fundamental rights, eyewitnesses to EU led reborderization. This article shares just some of the more startling trends which define border management on the eve of 2020, such as the denial of asylum rights, systemic firearms use, water immersion, and dog attacks.

With a shared database of 648 reports, BVMN is a collaborative project of organisations with the common goal of challenging the illegal pushback regime and holding relevant institutions to account.

“Pushback” describes the unlegislated expulsion of groups or individuals from one national territory to another, and lies outside the legal framework of “deportations”. On a daily basis, people-on-the-move are subject to these unlawful removals; a violent process championed by EU member states along the Balkan Route. In 2019, BVMN continued to shine a spotlight on these actions, perpetrated in the main part by states such as Croatia, Hungary, and Greece. Supporting actors also included Slovenia and Italy, and non-member states with the aid of Frontex which has seen its remit and funding widened heading into 2020.

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Volunteers and activists worked across the route in 2019 to listen to the voice of people facing these violations, taking interviews in the field and amplifying their calls for justice. Just some of the regular abuses that constitute pushbacks are listed below.
Guns and Firearm Abuse

The highest volume of BVMN reported pushbacks were from Croatia, a state which has been acting as a fulcrum of the EU’s external border policy in the West Balkans. It’s approximately 1300 kilometer long border with the non-member states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro have been a flashpoint for extremely violent pushbacks. Even in the challenging winter conditions, people make daily attempts to cross through the mountainous landscape of Croatia and are pushed back from the territory by a web of police actors who deny them the proper procedure and use crude physical abuse as a deterrent.

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Of major concern is the huge rise in gun use by Croatian officials against transit populations. In the first ten months of 2019 BVMN recorded 770 people who were pushed back by police officers who used guns to shoot or threaten. In November, shots were fired directly at transit groups, resulting in the near fatal wounding of one man, and causing a puncture wound in the shoulder of another. AYS reported on the shooting of two minors in 2017, showing this isn’t the first time guns were turned on unarmed transit people in Croatia.
Dog Attacks and K9 Units

The use of canine units in the apprehension and expulsion of transit groups is also a telling marker of the extreme violence that characterises pushbacks. Since the summer of 2019, a spike in the level of brutal dog attacks, and the presence of K9 units during pushbacks has been noted by BVMN. In a recent case, one man was mauled by a Croatian police dog for ten minutes under the direct guidance of the animals police handlers who laughed and shouted, “good, good”, as it almost severed a major blood vessel in the victim’s leg.

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Fortunately, the man survived, but with permanent injuries that he nurses still today in Bosnia-Herzegovina where he was illegally pushed back, in spite of his request for asylum and urgent physical condition. Sadly this is not an unfamiliar story. Across the route canine units remain a severe threat within pushbacks, as seen in cases recorded from North Macedonia to Greece where a man was severely bitten, or in chain a pushback from Slovenia where 12 unmuzzled police dogs traumatised a large transit group. Dogs as weapons are a timely reminder of the weighting of border policy towards violent aggression, and away from due legal access to asylum and regulated procedure.
Gatekeeping Asylum Access

K9 units and guns are ultra-violent policing methods that contribute directly to the blocking of asylum access. In the first eleven months of 2019, over 60% of Croatian pushbacks to Bosnia-Herzegovina saw groups make a verbal request for asylum. Yet in these cases, group members were pushed back from the territory without having their case heard, in direct contravention of European asylum law.

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Croatian authorities, along with a host of other states, have effectively mobilised pushbacks to remove people from their territories irrespective of claims for international protection. A host of actors, such as police officers and translators have warped the conditions for claiming asylum, regularly coercing people to sign removal documents, doctoring the ages of minors, or avoid any processing at all by delivering them to the green border immediately where they are pushed back with violence. Slovenia are also participants in this chain of asylum violation, seen most brutally in a case from July when pepper spray was used to target specifically the people who spoke out asking for asylum.
Wet Borders: River Pushbacks

Most pushbacks occur at remote areas of the green border, especially at night, where violence can be applied with effective impunity. A particular feature of police violence on the border is the weaponisation of rivers to abuse groups. Monitoring work from September revealed 50% of direct pushbacks from Croatia involved respondents being forced into rivers or immersed in water. This is accompanied regularly by the stripping of people (often to their underwear) and burning of their possessions. Then, police officer push them into the rivers that mark the boundary with Bosnia-Herzegovina (often the Glina and Korana), putting people at a high risk of drowning and hypothermia.

A recent case from November combined the use of firearms with this dangerous use of wet borders. A group of Algerians were pushed into a river by Croatian officers who were returning them to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

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The respondent recalled how: “They pushed me into the river and said, ‘Good luck.’”, while the officers fired guns into the air.

Meanwhile in the Evros region of Greece, the river border is used regularly to pushback people-on-the-move into Turkey. As in Croatia, the incidents often occur at night, and are carried out by officials wearing ski masks/balaclavas. Taken by force, transit groups report being loaded violently onto small boats and ferried across to the Turkish side. This regular and informal system of removal stands out as a common violation across Greece and the Balkan area, and raises major concerns about the associated risks of water immersion given the high levels of drowning which occur in the regions rivers.
2019 at the EU’s Doorstep

Border management on the Balkan Route has systematised a level of unacceptable, illegal and near fatal violence.

The trends noted in 2019 are an astonishing reminder that such boundaries are no longer governed by the rule of law, but characterised almost entirely by the informal use of pushback violations.

Gun use stands out as the most extreme marker of violence within pushbacks. But the shooting of weapons sits within a whole arsenal of policing methods that also include blunt physical assault, unlawful detention, abuse during transportation, taser misuse and stripping. Though Croatia emerged as a primary actor within BVMN’s dataset, common practive between EU member states were also clear, as across the region: Hungary, Slovenia and Greece continued to target people-on-the-move with a shared set of illegal and violent methods. The new interventions of Frontex outside of EU territory also look to compliment this reborderisation effort, as non-member states in the Western Balkans become integrated into the pushback regime.

The Border Violence Monitoring Network will continue to elevate the brave voices of those willing to expose these violent institutions. Their stories are a testament to the dire situation at Europe’s borders on the eve of 2020, and accountability will continue to be sought.

▻https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-special-2019-2020-a-year-of-violence-monitoring-pushbacks-on-the-balkan-
#2019 #chiens #armes #armes_à_feu

Balkan Region – Report June 2019

No Name Kitchen and Border Violence Monitoring have published a common report summarizing current developments in pushbacks and police violence in the Western Balkans, mainly in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and along the Serbian borders with Croatia and Hungary.

As such, this report contains analysis and a review of the situation in these areas as well. This report covers 41 reports of push-backs involving 237 people in transit. 21 of these were incidents of push-backs to BiH, 4 of these were incidents of push-backs to Serbia, and 4 of these were incidents of push-backs from BiH to Montenegro. The reports were conducted with a wide demographic variety of respondents ranging from families to single men to unaccompanied minors. The respondents to these reports also originate from a wide variety of countries such as Tunisia, Kurdistan Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Algeria to name a few.
The report details, among other things:

Push-backs to the Sturlic area of the Una-Sana Canton
The use of balaclava masks as an accessory to push-back violence
The Croatian Ministry of the Interior’s June media event in Grabovac
The trend of reverse flows along the Balkan Route
The publication of an open letter by a hiker in Croatia who witnessed the apprehension of a transit group by the country’s Special Police
The situation in northern Serbia related to border violence

▻https://www.borderviolence.eu/balkan-region-report-june-2019

Plus précisément pour les refoulements depuis la Slovénie :

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Bosnia-Croatia border: Needs grow for migrants losing EU entry ‘#game’

It’s referred to by everyone here as “The Game”, but there are few winners and a humanitarian crisis is brewing on the Bosnia-Croatia border as thousands of migrants and asylum seekers trying to reach the EU find themselves stuck with limited access to food, shelter, or healthcare.

They are caught between two poles: EU policies designed to reduce irregular crossings and keep people out, and political stalemate in Bosnia, which aid groups say is preventing local authorities from providing those in limbo with adequate protection or living conditions.

Since the closing of the old migrant route through the Balkans in 2016, Bosnia has emerged as a new way station for those trying to reach Croatia and head on to other nations like France and Germany in the EU’s Schengen free movement zone.

Migrants and asylum seekers bide their time in northwest Bosnia before attempting “The Game” – the cat-and-mouse evasion of Croatian police as they cross the highly securitised border and try to navigate dense woodland further into EU territory. The majority making this trip are pushed back by Croatian police, who are supported financially in their border operations by the EU.

Bosnia’s northwestern canton of Una-Sana has become the locus of the ensuing crisis, especially around its main city and administrative centre of Bihać.

As of June 2019, the UN’s migration agency, IOM, runs four migrant centres in Una-Sana, housing more than 3,100 migrants and asylum seekers. However, with an estimated 6,000 migrants in the canton, it’s not enough and thousands are sleeping rough.

Faced with sustained protests from local residents about the pressure this has placed on their communities, authorities have scrambled to find solutions.

In April, Una-Sana police increased measures that were introduced in October 2018 to prevent migrants and asylum seekers from entering the canton. In June, Bihać City Council began to clear the urban centre, with police rounding up and relocating groups of people to a new location at Vučjak, eight kilometres from the city centre.

The UN has refused to operate at Vučjak, citing concerns about its close proximity to minefields and situation on top of a former landfill site, referring to it as “unsuitable for human habitation”.

Opening additional accommodation centres would ease the pressure, but politicians have failed to create a national plan to share the burden. Milorad Dodik, Bosnian Serb member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tripartite presidency, has notably refused to host migrants and asylum seekers in Bosnia’s mainly Serb entity of Republika Srpska.

“The Ministry of Security doesn’t have a strategy,” Šuhret Fazlić, mayor of Bihać, told The New Humanitarian. “The only strategy they have is to try and close the border between Bosnia and Serbia, and to let migrants go to Croatia. But it doesn’t work because Croatia is pushing migrants back, and because Dodik won’t allow police from the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina or the army on the border with Serbia.”

Decision-making is complicated by the fact that the outgoing government has been acting in a caretaker capacity since October 2018 elections.

“If you look at who is currently the Minister of Security, his party and he as a person will definitely not be part of the new government,” said Peter Van der Auweraert, IOM’s chief of mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “The parties that will eventually form the government have no incentive to collaborate with him.”

With weak central leadership, IOM must navigate Bosnia’s local politics to open additional centres for migrants and asylum seekers who currently fall outside of the system.

“We have identified six alternative locations and now need a political decision at the canton level on which one of those is acceptable,” Van der Auweraert said. “In Bosnia it is so decentralised that canton authorities can really block that from happening. It takes a level of political courage to explain to people on the ground that there are actually economic benefits attached to opening a migrant centre. Unfortunately this has not happened, for example, in Una-Sana canton.”

As winter nears and thousands of migrants and asylum seekers continue to live in squalid conditions, the urgency of agreeing on the location of a new centre will only grow.

“Somebody has to find a solution,” said Fazlić. “The only thing that is up to the city is to propose new locations. We are ready for this, but we have only land and somebody has to find a way to build and prepare conditions for them.”

Journalist and photojournalist Nick Newsom spent 10 days in July talking to aid workers, migrants, and asylum seekers in northwestern Bosnia. Their testimonies and photos follow.
“We’re scared that the police will catch us”

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“We don’t go into the city centre because we’re scared that the police will catch us. You should see how we were when we lived in Turkey – I looked nothing like this," said Sufyan Al Sheikh Ahmad, 23, from Syria. “The circumstances here are very hard. Last time, we walked for six days in Croatia and reached Slovenia, but the Slovenian police caught us after two days. They handed us over to Croatian police, who took our money and bag, and broke our telephones. They took us to the border and we had to walk about 30 kilometres to Bihać. That was the fifth attempt. Inshallah, I will try again. I don’t have 3,000 euros to pay a smuggler, so I’m trying to walk. Wallah, I feel very tired.”

View from the road towards #Šturlić

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Many migrants and asylum seekers set off into Croatia from the Bosnian village of Šturlić, which lies just a few hundred metres from the border. The landscape on the Bosnian side is mountainous, densely forested, and becomes more so once one enters Croatian territory. Croatian authorities, funded to the tune of 131 million euros by the EU, deploy a wide range of technologies to detect and apprehend migrants on their territory. By contrast, the EU has provided 24 million euros to Bosnia since 2018 to help the country manage the migration crisis, on top of 24.6 million euros of assistance in the area of asylum, migration, and border management since 2007.

“I didn’t even have a t-shirt or shoes”

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“I’ve been in Bosnia four months,” said Zuhaib Arif, 18, from Pakistan. "I got here by train but got off about 70 kilometres from here, at Banja Luca, and walked the rest. The police told me to get off the train there, and anyone who this happens to has to come here by foot. Police tell us to go back and not go to Bihać. I went to Jungle Camp [Vučjak] but I didn’t have a blanket – I didn’t even have a t-shirt or shoes – they were stolen from me whilst I was sleeping.”

“They didn’t let me inside because they told me there is no space”

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“They didn’t let me inside the [Bira] camp because they told me there is no space. When the police came, they told us, ‘do not run – if you have no ID card, no problem,’ but when we stopped for them, they arrested us and took us to Jungle Camp. We walked for one and a half hours there. More than 200 people were walking. I think 30 to 40 percent came back here from Jungle Camp. If we don’t find a way to jump over the fence [into Bira], we will stay here tonight.”

“We urgently need more support”

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With the EU and UN having refused to support operations at Vučjak, the City of Bihać Red Cross is the only humanitarian organisation providing assistance to migrants at the camp, providing two meals a day for up to 700 people and first aid. “We are extremely stretched, both financially and in terms of human resources,” Rajko Lazic, secretary-general of the Red Cross Society of Bosnia and Herzegovina, told TNH. “Our volunteers and staff are exhausted. Our funds are running out. We urgently need more support.”

“We don’t want problems with the #police”

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Independent groups providing support to migrants and asylum seekers have been forced to operate more covertly as the political context in Una-Sana has changed and patience has begun to wear thin. No Name Kitchen, an NGO of volunteers from several countries that predominantly helps migrants and asylum seekers in Bosnia, runs a free clothes shop and carries out a distribution of food and non-food items to about 30 people a day in the town of Velika Kladuša, about 50 kilometres north of Bihać. “The way that we do that is low profile, hidden… because we don’t want problems with the police,” a No Name Kitchen volunteer told TNH. “As the political will to keep people contained within camps outside of cities has become more salient, there has been an effort to control independent organisations.”

“The conditions are always violent with the Croatian police”

“I’ve made six trips from Bosnia,” said Rachid Boudalli, 35, from Morocco. Each time the Slovenian police have caught me and handed me over to the Croatian police. The conditions are always violent with the Croatian police, they hit us, take our stuff from us: our money, our telephones, anything we have. They’ve taken eight power banks from me and four mobiles. I ask the responsible European parties to look into our situation.”

“They are shameless beyond belief”

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“The Croatian police steal our money, our personal papers – everything that we need," said Eman Muhammad Al Ahmad, a 30-year-old Palestinian refugee from Syria. “As an already persecuted people escaping war, we now suffer from bandits in European countries. When I asked for my Syrian ID card back, they shouted in my face ‘shut up’ and threatened to hit me in the head with their truncheon. They are shameless beyond belief, searching us in a filthy way that doesn’t fit the police of a developed European state. They persecute women by removing her hijab under the guise that she’s got something hidden in there. What does a refugee want to hide? As refugees, we just want to cross peacefully into a European state to be with our families and children – no more and no less.”

“I told them that I want asylum in Slovenia, but they didn’t reply”

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“I see all kinds of animals in the forest,” Yassin Nowar, 24, from Algeria told TNH. “After eight days of walking, we found this bear in Croatia. Four days later the police caught us.”

For some, the circumstances are too much to endure any longer. “I want to go back to my country because the situation here is very difficult,” Amjad Al Ghanem, a 24-year-old from the Occupied Palestinian Territories told TNH. “I’ve tried ‘the game’ six times. Three times I reached Slovenia and I told them that I want asylum in Slovenia, but they didn’t reply and returned us to Croatia. At least in Palestine I can take care of myself. I had a dream, but it’s gone: I’ve had enough.”

▻https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/photo-feature/2019/08/05/bosnia-croatia-border-needs-grow-migrants-losing-eu-entry-game
#The_game #Sturlic #police #violences_policières

More and more different voices are speaking out loud: not only local and international journalists try to investigate and raise awareness on the illegal behavior by Croatian authorities: the same policemen keep on talking and contributing with pieces of evidence in support of what Welcome! Initiatives write about in the last three years: systematic push backs and illegal practices, among others the denial of access to asylum for people in search for safety, perpetrated by Croatian police officers. “Action corridor” is the way in which it has been called - “Our interlocutor warns that the intervention and special police, in particular, are encouraged to be as “harsh” as possible in deterring migrants (►https://net.hr/danas/hrvatska/zastrasujuca-devijacija-akcije-koridor-policija-sve-dogovara-na-whatsappu-a-pose). Because they are thought to be so discouraged that they later won’t try to cross the border again. The Ogulin area is allegedly also used with dogs to attack, which is actually illegal and extremely inhumane in dealing with migrants, an anonymous police officer told Net.hr”.In the article, you can see picture of people, including migrants, kept in cages at Croatian border crossing areas. This is not the first time that policemen speak publicly about the illegal behavior of Ministry of Interior - this has been addressed by the Ombudswoman (▻https://www.telegram.hr/politika-kriminal/pucka-pravobraniteljica-primila-anonimno-pismo-policajca-tvrdi-kako-je-isti), and by an anonymous police source that decided to speak with the journalist Barbara Matejcic (▻https://welcome.cms.hr/index.php/en/2019/07/26/new-evidence-of-violent-pushbacks-executed-by-croatian-police-and-the-eu). Unfortunately, still we do not have any information about any investigation or sanctioning the responsibles of these actions.

If you want to read more about police abuses in the whole region, read the report for November period published by the Network “Border Violence Monitoring” (▻https://www.borderviolence.eu/balkan-region-report-november-2019/#more-14026). The reports analyse the situation in Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, giving an overview of the whole situation in the region. Violence has no nationality - once again, authorities are abusing their power and their force against people who are looking for safety in Europe.

The failure EU approach toward the migration phenomenon and the situation at the Croatian borders are well explained in this article (►https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/06/croatia-is-abusing-migrants-while-the-eu-turns-a-blind-eye), which well explains the hypocritical behavior of European Union institutions. The evidence of Croatian police violence toward migrants is overwhelming, but Brussels continues to praise and fund Zagreb for patrolling the European Union’s longest external land border.

Reçu via Inicijativa dobrodosli, mail du 17.12.2019.