Immigrants in Bosnia: "They are everywhere"

In the Bosnian border town of Bihać, the situation is increasing dramatically. 90 percent of migrants in Bosnia-Herzegovina are currently in the 61,000-inhabitant city, informed the mayor Šuhret Fazlić. According to official figures, it should be up to 10,000. But how many are actually there is difficult to answer. The immigrant groups almost exclusively of men in the city center and in the surrounding area are too scattered.

Although 1,500 of them have already been taken to a makeshift warehouse on a former landfill site in Vuçjak, five kilometers away, the cityscape is still marked by immigrants: on the park benches, in abandoned houses, in the pedestrian area of ​​the city center, on the Bank of the Una, the river flowing through Bihać.

Number of migrants has continued to increase
"They are everywhere," complains a 20-year-old Bosnian to Junge Freiheit. Already the past year was "extreme" for the city when thousands of migrants camped in and around Bihać. Their number has increased significantly this summer. So strong that a reception center set up by the city had to close because the capacity was no longer sufficient.

"In the meantime, I no longer feel safe here," says the woman. Her three friends standing next to her agree with her. Every day, young women are subjected to insults, sexual harassment and immoral intercourse by immigrants, mostly from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. "It comes to rape, but due to shame hardly anyone talks about it."

Congestion on Croatian EU border
Bihać is for the migrants only a transit station on their way to Central Europe, mostly to Germany. Because the Balkan route could largely be closed after the interventions of the then Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz in 2017, the influx of immigrants is now accumulating on the Croatian EU external border.

Source:
Junge Freiheit