AYS Daily Digest 23/12/20: Fire and evictions at the Bosnian camp of Lipa
By: Are You Syrious
Tags: France, Bosnia, Digest, Greece, Frontex

AYS Daily Digest 23/12/20: Fire and evictions at the Bosnian camp of Lipa

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Lipa fire — photo credit Klix and SOS Balkanroute

FEATURED — Eviction and a fire breaks out at the Lipa refugee camp

The camp was due to close as it hosted people in inhumane and squalid conditions. However, the eviction has not been coordinated with the appropriate re-location of the people who lived at Lipa, leaving 1000+ people homeless, without any provisional solution from the international organisations who have been given the mandate to run camps across the country.

LIPA CAMP FIRE: A CHRONOLOGY OF THE CATASTROPHE — see video

Following months of sub-human conditions at the Lipa camp in the Una-Sana Canton in Bosnia and Herzegovina, near the Croatian border, things took a foreseeably ugly turn. Here is the hour-to-hour account of everything that went wrong last night and today, resulting in over a thousand new homeless migrants in the area.

Yesterday around 4 pm, IOM staff tried to move 46 people in three vans from Lipa camp to the old, hard-structure Bira camp in the nearby city of Bihać that was cleared out a few months ago following pressure from local authorities. When the IOM vans arrived at the gate of Bira ex-factory-turned-camp in Bihać, a group of 50 locals and police officers intercepted them, blocking the entrance to Bira, so the people had to be returned to the Lipa. Thirty minutes later, the municipality sent a firefighter brigade that helped block the gate of the camp.

Following that incident, last night the IOM started informing their partners and other organisations that the long-awaited closure of Lipa camp is set for today in the morning. A late evening meeting was held with the key stakeholders to organise the evacuation.

This morning around 8 am, IOM started taking people out of tents and asking them to form lines inside the camp. Some organisations were not allowed in the camp. It seems DRC staff were present inside, but they evacuated together with IOM after the fire broke out around 11 am.

It is interesting to note that in Bihać, where Bira is located, at around 10 am people were already saying that Lipa would soon be burnt to the ground, and there were a lot of conflicting rumours about who might be responsible for it. For example, anti-migrants groups on Facebook alleged some people working at the camp in official capacity might have something to do with the fire, in an attempt to put pressure on Bihać authorities to open a local radio station Bira camp. On the other hand, many locals are convinced that the migrants burnt down the camp themselves, in hopes of being transferred to Bira. The head of IOM in Bosnia published on his Twitter account that a group of former Lipa residents set the camp on fire after most of the people had already been evacuated.

When the fire broke out at 11 am, police surrounded the camp and tried to remove the people from the perimeter, but at the same time they didn’t allow them to walk towards the city of Bihać. After an hour, special police also arrived at the site.

Following the news of the fire, today at noon, there was a protest of locals in front of Bira camp, opposing the reinstalment of the camp inside the old factory, once again with the presence of the fire brigade that was blocking the entrance. At 1 pm, the police and firefighters blocked the streets towards the city, obstructing the passage for 300 people who were trying to walk to Bihać.

In the afternoon, demoralized people started putting up small makeshift tents in front of Lipa, after it had been completely burnt to the ground, with no food, water or any basic facilities.

The central Bosnian government is now putting the pressure on cantonal and city authorities to open Bira camp, but the mayor of Bihać is refusing to, in response to pressure from the citizens who don’t want the camp in the city anymore.

As a result of this ping-pong, over a thousand residents of Lipa camp are left to sleep rough, with almost no support and no shelter to protect them from the winter temperatures. This humanitarian catastrophe might be stopped by reopening Bira camp, but there seems to be no political will to do so. We’ll keep reporting from the ground.

Lipa camp was to be closed on Wednesday and moved to another location, but officials said that since its tents and other facilities were almost entirely destroyed in the fire it cannot immediately be moved to another spot.

It is good to remind everyone that the fact the Lipa tents were not suitable to be called accommodation or to be considered a permanent solution was obvious and known since the begining. However, it was also obvious that a strong dialogue, lobbying, planning and a lot of work was going to be needed in order to gain trust and support from the political side in order to be able to lodge everyone who needed accommodation. Not much was done on that part from the UN agencies, apart from last minute (last months) public warnings, but with their vast experience, surely they knew that occasional statements in the media would not bring about the solution.

The UN also called again on the Bosnian authorities to make available new locations, preferably outside the Una, Sana and Sarajevo Cantons, for people stranded outdoors in temperatures below freezing. The United Nations repeated that capacities and funds for solutions were available. However, a solution will not be easy to find. The authorities of Bosnia’s other entity, Republika Srpska, have said they do not want any camps on RS territory, while political leaders on territory where Bosniaks predominate share the same feeling.

For more videos documenting the fire, see here and here