Balkans, migrants lined up under the snow

On 23 December a fire destroyed it the refugee camp of Lipa in Bosnia. Since that day, migrants, mainly from Pakistan and Afghanistan, rejected by Croatia, Slovenia and Italy have been frozen under the snow. Without any shelter. And they would have remained so anyway, because on that date the closure of the camp was ordered due to inadequacy to accommodate people: there was no water, sewage and electricity.

Several photographers have documented in recent weeks the hell that thousands of people are experiencing: from queuing up barefoot or in slippers under the snow to receive food from the local Red Cross, to trying to wash themselves with the ice water available nearby.

It is not the first year that we have seen images of this type. Why does it keep happening?

Just on the same days, the court of Rome upheld the appeal of a Pakistani citizen, aged 27, asylum seeker who was rejected first in Slovenia by Italy, then in Croatia and then in Bosnia. “It was a complex case, but very important,” Caterina Bove explained to Internazionale, who together with Anna Brambilla of the Association for Legal Studies on Immigration (Asgi) presented the appeal “The boy fled his country for his sexual orientation, had tried the so-called game several times, but he had been rejected ten times from Croatia to Bosnia ».

In 2020 alone, more than a thousand people were pushed back to the Italian-Slovenian border. For many years, the Balkan route has been crossed by thousands (65 thousand since 2018), however Bosnia has not opened any suitable structures to accommodate these people, who today are locked in tents and shacks. “For the past two years we have been delivering over 90 million euros for centers, equipment, medical and social assistance, ”he said Peter Stano, spokesman for the EU High Representative. “We need them to move, not to play with people’s lives.”