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Among the thousands of people trying to cross the border from Bosnia-Herzegovina into Croatia are numerous families. The children are forced to watch as their parents are beaten and humiliated.
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Von Sonja Peteranderl and Alessio Mamo (Photos)
26.02.2021
An Afghan girl runs through slush near the border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Foto: Alessio Mamo
While they cross the frost and the mountains attempting to cross into Croatia, children play at chasing each other or climbing trees. According to the Danish Refugee Council, in 2020, over 800 children were pushed back by the Croatian authorities and some of them were under the age of six.
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They’re not playing “cops and robbers.” Instead, in the iteration played by children of migrant families stranded in Bosnia-Herzegovina, some of the kids are refugees while the others play the border police who are constantly trying to hunt them down.
The charade is but a reflection of what takes place every single day as asylum-seekers try to cross the border into Croatia and the European Union – a daily cat-and-mouse chase that the migrants simply call “The Game.” Most, though, are stopped in the attempt, often with violence, and forced back into Bosnia-Herzegovina – with children often having to stand by and watch as their parents are robbed, beaten and humiliated, or are the victims of violence themselves.
Croatian border police “have used force, pummeling people with fists, kicking them, and making them run gauntlets between lines of police officers,” according to a Human Rights Watch report on the systematic human rights violations. “Violence has been directed against women and children,” the report continues. The report notes that migrants who are intercepted by border guards are not returned to areas near border crossings, but to remote regions, and they are “at times forced to cross freezing streams.”
Human rights organizations around the world have been criticizing the illegal returns – so-called “pushbacks” – for years. Currently, officials with the European Union border protection agency Frontex are under investigation in connection with such pushbacks. Nevertheless, the controversial practice continues, thus denying migrants the possibility of submitting asylum applications in the EU.
The Danish Refugee Council (DRC) has documented 16,000 illegal pushbacks carried out by Croatian border guards in 2020 alone, including 800 incidents involving children. “Compared to previous months, the rate of women and children reporting pushbacks is also increasing,” notes a report from November 2020.
Since the EU closed down the Balkan Route, more and more migrants have found their journey to Europe coming to an end in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including numerous families. In the past months of winter, their situations have worsened significantly, particularly through the closure of several refugee camps. In December 2020, for example, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) cleared out the Lipa reception center near Bihac because it had neither running water nor electricity. But there were no replacement shelters, leading to 1,300 people suddenly having no roof over their heads.
The IOM estimates that there are currently between 9,000 and 10,000 migrants in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with around 3,000 people camping out in below-zero temperatures with no water or electricity in vacant homes and factory buildings, in tents or in the forest.
It isn’t a pleasant place to stay, so people desperately continue trying to cross the border. The Italian photographer Alessio Mamo accompanied families from Afghanistan, with babies and small children, in their attempts to get into Europe.