AYS Daily Digest 17/7/20 Devastation in Bosnia: Security forces destroy camp
By: Are You Syrious
Tags: Refugees, Covid 19, Digest, Greece, Bosnia

Update from NoName Kitchen: “Yesterday, July 16th, special security forces and cleaning workers from the city council picked up the settlement where hundreds of people were living, around the official refugee camp. People have no other place around where to live.”

According to the media, radiovkladusa.ba, the removal was of a “wild settlement” and took place “without incident.” Yet NoName Kitchen continues describing how devastating the loss is of the “wild settlement” is to the people who needed its shelter:

“According to the information we have received, all the tents, clothes, backpacks, food and belongings in general were thrown away. Some 200 people were transferred to the Lipa refugee camp, an official camp made of giant tents, located far from any urban nucleus and paid for with EU money. Many other people ran away for fear of what might happen to them.

No name kitchen volunteer on Velika Kladuša told us: “They destroyed everything. I dont have the words to describe you how it looks here. No place to go. Some people is in the woods hiding. No clothes, no tents, no nothing”

The situation is still dramatic. The Miral reception camp finally opened its doors after having people confined for much longer than the government demanded for the rest of the country’s citizens, and this has caused many people to leave to try ‘the game’. We are seeing pushbacks every week, of all sorts, people being victims of violence permanently, many pushbacks, violent and illegal, from Slovenia and from Italy. Although this happened before, the last 4–6 weeks it is something really striking, especially from Italy, where certain rights, such as the application for asylum, are supposedly tightly protected.

If we add to this that many people have come from other places, many from BiH, from Montenegro, Serbia and so on, this means that right now we know that apart from the 600–700 people in the camp, there are also some 600–700 people outside the camp, in a really dire situation. The police are expelling them from the squats where they generally seek shelter, and we have many people on the river bank, with two plastics, some with tents — those who have been able to access them, which are few, of course.

We have had days of over 40 degrees, a terrible heat and very little hygiene, because there is the river but there is a lack of soap and clean clothes. All this is compounded by the rather unstable climate in terms of border opening and closures. This does not affect so much people who don’t cross at the official borders, but it does affect our work teams, because we have already had volunteers, activists who have gone and had to leave because they were closing the borders again. But still, we are continuing the work.

We continue with the system of exchangeable coupons for food, the famous vouchers we have been mentioning for some time. We have expanded the program, now we have three supermarkets and more than 600–700 people every week who have access to food in this way, to the food they want, so that they can cook it the way they want, and that is a triumph.

And in parallel, there are already activists of No Name Kitchen on the ground preparing the return of the teams, not only to Velika Kladusa, but also to Maljevac, where we have the central warehouse, the logistic centre, and where we are right now working on improving and maintenance, changing a little all the structure so that it can also give service to our projects in Balkans.

A few days ago we made a couple of calls: we need handy volunteers interested in coming to help, building shelves, sorting clothes … there is a lot of work to do; and we need donations of clothing, especially summer, shorts, sneakers, and also phones.

Not only people in Velika Kladusa need clothes. Volunteers and activists located in other key points around Bosnia and Herzegovina such as Tuzla, Kljuc, Bihac or Sarajevo.”