It was almost lunchtime at a dormitory on the outskirts of Bihac in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina and an Afghan woman sheltered from the rain in a tent before joining the queue for food.
The dormitory was unfinished. Its windows had no glass, the water pipes leaked and there were holes in the upper floors. The stench of smoke and urine hung in the air.
“This is not a camp, and that is not food,” said the woman, who did not give her name.
Bihac is no stranger to crisis.
Twenty-five years ago this city was under siege, its mainly Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) residents trapped on all sides by Bosnian Serb forces for whom control of Bihac would strengthen supply lines between themselves and their ethnic kin fighting a rebel war just over the border in Croatia.
Yugoslavia was collapsing in bloodshed, and Bihac’s proximity to road and rail communications made it a strategic prize. Today, that location means it is a magnet for migrants and refugees from Asia, Africa and the Middle East carving out a new route through the Balkan peninsula to Western Europe.
For around 1,000, the squalid dormitory and the sodden tents out front are a temporary home, their way forward into European Union member Croatia blocked by police whom rights groups accuse of using heavy-handed tactics to keep them out.
The numbers heading north from Greece via Albania, Montenegro and Bosnia have doubled since last year, with Bosnia now struggling to provide accommodation and food to around 5,000, 3,000 of whom are in Bihac.
The numbers do not compare with 2015, when hundreds of thousands streamed north from Greece through Macedonia and Serbia. But with that route largely shut down, smugglers are hemming closer to the Adriatic.
It has put a particular strain on Bosnia, still in the long process of recovery from a 1992-95 war that killed 100,000 people and left the country divided along ethnic lines.
Memories of suffering:
When BIRN visited Bihac, on July 23, the rain did not stop. Clothes and blankets were soaked.
Residents stood in line for their meals, eating in shifts as the dining room, which doubles as sleeping quarters at night, is too small for all of them. That day, the Red Cross served breakfast for 900 and 1,150 hot meals for lunch and dinner. There are just six toilet and shower cabins.
Children played near the road with stray dogs. When the sun comes out, they swim in the emerald waters of the nearby River Una, though even this escape was blighted by tragedy on July 5 when one person drowned.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
