Category Archives: Balkans

Och, the Puir Wee Bosnian Bairns!

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A German journalist was caught trafficking migrants across the border from Bosnia to Croatia. It seems the enterprising member of the Fourth Estate contrived to enable the border crossing in order to create a heart-rending story that he could write up for his newspaper.

Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from the Austrian tabloid eXXpress:

Employee of the left-wing Tagesspiegel arrested as a human trafficker

It is reminiscent of the “Relotius” case. The German blogger and journalist of the left-wing Berlin portal Tagesspiegel Sebastian Leber (44) was arrested on the border between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina — he was accompanied by a group of migrants whom he allegedly wanted to bring illegally across the border to write an article later about their harrowing trip.

Leber had crossed the border illegally with seven migrants. The attempt to create his own “maudlin” story was stopped by the Croatian border police.

The German blogger and journalist of the “Tagesspiegel” Sebastian Leber was arrested in Croatia because he wanted to smuggle migrants illegally across the EU’s external border and make a story out of it.

— Jonas (@realjonaswd) November 21, 2021

Smuggling charges dropped — appeal

The incident occurred on Friday in the municipality of Cetingrad near the border with Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Karlovac City Court sentenced the journalist to a fine of 3,600 kuna (€500) for illegally crossing the border. The court dropped the charge of smuggling brought by the border police. The border police announced an appeal against the first instance judgment.

UPDATE: Statement from the editor-in-chief

Update: Late in the afternoon, the editor-in-chief of the Tagesspiegel, Lorenz Maroldt, spoke up: Leber went to the border as a reporter, the comparisons with Relotius were “absurd”. In addition (as can be seen in the eXXpress article, editor’s note) the charge of smuggling was dropped.

Croatian President Zoran Milanović on Masks and the Vax Passport

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The following clip is excerpted from a recent press conference given by Croatian President Zoran Milanović. When questioned about the Wuhan Coronavirus, Mr. Milanović’s remarks deviated significantly from the Narrative imposed by the New World Order.

My favorite line: “Those are the measures that have infringed on human freedoms, not rights; those were fundamental freedoms, at the level of the right to photosynthesis, really.”

Many thanks to Vortac for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:


Video link

Video transcript:

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Hungary and Serbia Plan to Stop the Migration Tsunami

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Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from the German-language service of RT:

Orbán: Hungary and Serbia will rebuild Central Europe and protect it from waves of immigration

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has declared that Budapest and Belgrade are committed to rebuilding Central Europe. The two Balkan states would also protect the region from waves of migration from Afghanistan.

On Wednesday Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic met with her Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orbán in Budapest for a joint government meeting. After the meeting, the Hungarian head of government announced that the two countries had agreed to rebuild Central Europe. He explained:

“At the moment, however, it is not enough just to rebuild. We also have to protect it to ensure the security of Central Europe.”

The Hungarian Prime Minister referred to the crisis in Afghanistan, which has the potential to cause a “migration tsunami” to spill over to the European continent.

Orbán emphasized that Serbia and Hungary also “defend Western European countries such as Austria and Germany” as long as the two Balkan countries “stand in the way of migration flows.”

Austria’s Interior Minister Karl Nehammer had previously complained about the prospect of taking in Afghan refugees after the Taliban came to power, and bluntly stated that “there is no reason why Afghans should come to Austria now”. Meanwhile, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and his government are sticking to the deportation of rejected asylum seekers and illegal migrants to their home countries.

Levente Magyar, State Secretary of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, warned last month that the dramatic situation in Kabul “could conjure up an era of migration and international terrorism that we did not want and perhaps could have avoided.” Budapest made it clear that it will not allow Afghan asylum seekers unhindered access to Hungary.

The Hungarian head of government had already come under fire for his anti-immigration stance. At the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, Hungary put up a fence on its southern border with Serbia to keep out migrants coming from the Middle East.

The Hazards of the New Balkan Route to Western Europe

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Even before the collapse of the American-backed government in Afghanistan, there was an intense pressure from Afghan “refugees” on the external borders of the European Union.

The following report on the new migration route through the northern Balkans is from Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR, Central German Broadcasting, the public broadcaster for Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt). Many thanks to Hellequin GB for the translation:

Afghan refugees on their way to the EU

Because Croatia and Hungary have erected high border fences on the Balkan route, refugees are now increasingly trying to get to the EU via Romania. The number of illegal border crossings rose by 200 percent in the first half of the year. Important hub: the western Romanian city of Timisoara. Many people seeking protection want to find a truck there that they can use to get to Western Europe undetected.

Ahmadi’s brown eyes look sadly into the distance; he is holding his destroyed cell phone in his left hand. The 17-year-old is sitting on a meadow in Timisioara in western Romania, in what is known as the Afghan Park, as Ahmadi and his compatriots call their meeting point at a shopping park. Almost every day there are checks by the police and gendarmerie, from which Afghan refugees repeatedly report that they’re been attacked or had their cell phones destroyed.

Ahmadi considers it pointless to report the incident to the police. That doesn’t help him get a new cell phone, either, he says. The telephone was his orientation aid on the run; he was able to use it to call up routes across the Middle East and now in Europe. Without a cell phone, he cannot contact his smuggler who is supposed to bring him to Germany.

On the run for over a year

The young Afghan left his home region of Nangarhar long before the international troops withdrew, otherwise he would have had to join the radical Islamic Taliban at home or hide from it, he says. “I preferred to forge on ahead.” He also wants to lead an economically better life in Western Europe. He has already covered around 5,000 kilometers, a large part of it on the Balkan route from Greece via Bulgaria to Serbia. In four months, he hopes, he will be with his brother in Germany, but Ahmadi has been on the run for over a year now.

It was particularly difficult, he says, in Serbia, where meter-high fences have made access to the EU almost impossible since the great refugee movement in 2015. He made nine attempts to come to Croatia. He tried to cross the Serbian-Hungarian border three times, all without success. Most recently, he took the route via neighboring Romania, which for a long time was considered a dead end among those seeking protection: since the EU country does not belong to the Schengen area, all borders in Romania are strictly controlled — including that with the EU neighbor Hungary.

Over 530 kilometers of green border with Serbia

But for a few months now, the Eastern European country has seen a significant increase in the number of refugees and migrants. The Romanian border authority registered almost 9,000 border crossings in the first half of the year, 200 percent more than in the same period of the previous year. The majority of those seeking protection do not come from Ukraine or the Black Sea, but from Serbia over the green border, which in some places meanders along the Danube, and runs through countless forests and fields.

The Romanian press recently wrote that a “new Balkan route” led through western Romania. An assumption that the border police in Timisoara do not want to share, even if most border crossings were on their 530-kilometer stretch with Serbia this year. “Regardless of whether this is called the new Balkan route or not,” says the spokesman for the Timisoara border police, Petre Nicola, “we are well prepared for every scenario.”

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The Biologic Urge to Readjust the Map of Europe

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In the two years since Dymphna died I have dedicated myself to putting my affairs in order, so that the future Baron won’t have too hard a time when I shuffle off this mortal coil and go to claim my 72 virgins. One of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks has been to clean out, cull, and reorganize the material in the filing cabinets here at Schloss Bodissey. I have to pull out all the papers and scrutinize them before deciding whether to keep them or not. In the process I have come across a number of delightful surprises, plus a few mysteries.

An example of the latter is a hand-written chart (to be discussed in detail below). It’s in pencil, in my handwriting (and very small — you can tell my eyes were still working), written on the back of a computer printout that dates it to 1990. It’s basically a compendium of territorial changes in Europe between 1916 and 1945.


(Click to enlarge)

The big mystery is: why the heck did I put the thing together? It was written fourteen years before we started blogging. The future Baron was too small at that point for the document to have been one my lesson plans for him. The material in it closely tracks what I had to absorb to take my A-levels (and special papers) in European history. But it was written twenty years after I took my exams, so I couldn’t possibly have been regurgitating it from memory. I can tell I consulted the Harvard Encyclopedia of World History (a 1948 edition inherited from my father that is now held together by duct tape. It is one of the most treasured resources in my reference library, second only to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology). Alas, I can no longer read it without a magnifying glass, so I won’t be checking any of the dates and facts on my chart to make sure they’re right.

For weeks I puzzled over the document, trying to figure out why I compiled it. My best guess is that Dymphna had been reading something — possibly The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman — and wanted to know about the territorial adjustments made in the map of Europe by the Treaty of Versailles and others that followed in the wake of the Great War. She knew I was well-versed in modern European history, so she must have asked me if I would put something together that would summarize it for her. I would have been delighted by her request, because I love to do that sort of thing — or used to, when my eyes still functioned normally.

The chart is a useful resource, so I took the trouble to transcribe it as well as I could. Doing so brought back memories of all that old A-level material. Vojvodina! I hadn’t thought about that name in a while. And some of the other names — Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Moldavia, etc. — are well-known now, because they’re sovereign states, but they weren’t in 1990; they were still socialist republics within one or the other of the communist superstates.

I can still remember a few more names that didn’t make it to the chart — the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, for example, or Eastern Rumelia.

The map of Europe was drastically reorganized after 1917 (after the Bolshevik Revolution, that is) and then even more so after 1918 in a series of treaties that divvied up the territory of the collapsed empires. Adolf Hitler did his part to rearrange the map even further, and then major revisions took place after the end of World War Two until 1946 or so. After that everything was frozen in place by the Cold War for the next 45 years. Then suddenly in the 1990s you started to see names in the newspaper that hadn’t been there since the 1930s — Montenegro, for instance, and Estonia. And things are still in flux now — who knows what the map of Europe will look like after the EU finally collapses?

Here’s my transcription of the document. I tried to put it in date order as far as possible. I expanded abbreviations when I was sure what they meant; otherwise I left them as-is:

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Subservient in Serbia

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A refugee-welcoming official (female, of course) in Serbia caused a ruction and got herself into hot water at a migrant camp when she accidentally trod on one of Allah’s sacred prayer rugs.

Many thanks to László for translating this article from the Hungarian-language Serbian media outlet delhir.info:

Rampage of invaders: migrants go wild and humiliate a Serbian woman into the dust at the immigration center

December 27, 2020

Migrants (young men only) housed in the Bogovađa reception center near Lajkovac in western Serbia recently caused a serious incident.

After a 34-year-old female official of the Serbian High Commissioner for Refugees, who supports unstoppable migration and provides comfort and privileges for immigrants, accidentally stepped on an Islamic doormat (or, to be polite: a Muslim prayer rug), the immigrants began to rage.

To calm the mood, the woman agreed to the humiliation of kissing the “desecrated” piece of cloth.

The satisfied migrants began to “Allahu Akhbar”.

After many people were able to see what happened via social media, the Serbian regime could no longer take it lightly.

The police arrested (for the sake of appearance?) two underage Afghans, although it is clear that many (perhaps the complete “population” of the reception center) were involved in the incident, and therefore mass deportation would probably be the only logical solution.

However, it is likely that the two arrested perpetrators will be released soon. Unfortunately, it is also possible that the humiliated woman will continue her activities.

One of the attached videos shows the incident and the other one reflects the atmosphere in the Lajkovac reception center.

See the original article for the videos. Without knowing the language or detailed context of the situation, however, I wasn’t able to get much out of them.

The Unauthorized Use of the Trademark For OSCE Inc.

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Long-time readers will remember that for more than a decade Gates of Vienna has reported extensively on the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Beginning in 2009, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and Henrik Clausen worked tirelessly to expose the growing Islamization of the organization. They attended OSCE “Human Dimension” conferences in Warsaw and Vienna to make interventions (short presentations) and hold side events. In later years they were joined by other Counterjihad stalwarts, including Alain Wagner, Dave Petteys, Maj. Stephen Coughlin, Clare Lopez, Katie Hopkins, and others.

Last Friday I received the following letter as a PDF attached to an email from the OSCE (sent by Daniel Stirrat, a Legal Assistant in the Office of Legal Affairs). Interestingly, although it arrived here in the afternoon of December 11, well before midnight CET, it is dated December 12:

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Office of Legal Affairs                Vienna, 12 December 2020

To whom it may concern,

It has come to the attention of the Secretariat of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that there has been unauthorized use of OSCE’s trademark, including the OSCE emblem and name, on your website. For ease of reference, please see the following examples:

Please note that the OSCE’s name in English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish, its abbreviation in all those languages and its emblem are the exclusive property of the OSCE, protected under Article 6ter of the 1883 Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (as amended), and were duly registered with the World Intellectual Property Organization on 31 August 2001. As such, they may not be copied, reproduced, displayed, or used without the express prior written permission of the OSCE.

The OSCE has not consented to the use of its trademark on your website. Any engagement on your side in OSCE activities and/or events does not constitute such consent. In light thereof, you are requested to remove the OSCE trademark from your website immediately and refrain from using it in the future without obtaining the prior express written consent of the OSCE.

Thank you in advance for your co-operation.

Yours sincerely,

 

 

 

Stephen Walsh,
Head of the Office of Legal Affairs

Gates of Vienna
gatesofvienna{at}chromatism{dot}net

Wallnerstrasse 6
A-1010 Vienna, Austria		   Tel:
+43-1-51436-0		   Fax
+43-1-51436-6996		   pm@osce.org
osce.org
 

I had not been aware that the OSCE was an industry, and that it was therefore covered by the 1883 Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. To rectify my error, I immediately went through all the OSCE posts and replaced all instances of the OSCE™ logo with the one shown at the top of this post. Then I wrote the following reply to the OSCE:

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“The EU’s Manifest Arrogance and Self-Righteousness”

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The European Union is attempting to strong-arm Serbia and Kosovo to prevent them from recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which was part of the deal between the two countries brokered by President Trump.

Joachim Kuhs is a member of the Budget and Budget Control Committees of the European Parliament and of the National Committee of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany), and he chairs the group “Christians in the AfD”. In August of 2019 Mr. Kuhs visited Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria with a delegation of the “Jews in the AfD”.

Mr. Kuhs recently spoke out in the EP about the EU’s interference with the Balkan states. Politically Incorrect has the story (in German). The following English-language account was sent in by a contact in the European Parliament:

Kuhs: The EU Wants to Tell Israel, Kosovo and Serbia What Israel’s Capital Is

The EU’s Foreign Policy Speaker Peter Stano has warned Serbia and Kosovo against recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, saying it goes against the EU’s “common position on Jerusalem.”

Joachim Kuhs commented:

The EU is trying to tell three sovereign nations what to do: Kosovo, Serbia and Israel, while blackmailing Kosovo and Serbia, which have received over €2.1 billion in EU accession funding through 2020.

The EU has no right to tell other nations what their capital is. Jerusalem has been the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish nation since the time of King David. If certain parts of it are now thought of as “Arab”, it is because of the violent pogroms with which the Jews were driven out of them. After the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem by Jordan 1948, all 59 synagogues there were destroyed. Anyone who wants to deny Israel the right to determine its own capital is making themselves complicit in these crimes against the Jewish people.

The EU’s manifest arrogance and self-righteousness should make all EU candidates think long and hard about giving up their sovereignty to these people.

In Bosnia, the Barbarians are Inside the Gates

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I posted last month about a Serbian-German man named Irfan Peci. I gave a thumbnail bio of him then, but here it is again: Mr. Peci was born in Serbia, and in the early 1990s, when he was still very small, his family moved to Germany to escape the Balkan wars. As a young man he was recruited by the local Al Qaeda affiliate in Germany, and worked for their propaganda organization. He was eventually arrested and imprisoned by the German authorities. While he was still in prison he was de-radicalized, and when he left prison became an undercover agent within Al Qaeda for the German government. After he was exposed, he wrote a book about his experiences and started producing videos.

Mr. Peci understands Bosnian, so he is able to sift through videos and written material from Bosnia and present it to German-speaking audiences. For the following video he compiled a series of clips from Bosnia in which culture-enrichers vandalize property, take part in armed marches, and commit brutal criminal violence, including against each other.

The thousands of migrants now massed in Bosnia are attempting to force their way into Croatia, after which they will be in the EU, and can then proceed through Slovenia and Austria to get to the Promised Land in Germany.

Many thanks to MissPiggy for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:


Video link

Video transcript:

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Migrants Rush the Border at Röszke

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Röszke is a town on the border between Hungary and Serbia. In the Great Migration Crisis of 2015, a large mob of migrants attacked the border crossing there (previous reports about Röszke: September 2015, August 2016, November 2016).

Early yesterday morning a mob of dozens of migrants rushed the border at Röszke and tried to break through into Hungary. Guards fired warning shots, and most of the crowd ran back into Serbia.

The following Hungarian news report describes what happened. It includes surveillance video of the incident and an account of the events as they unfolded. Many thanks to CrossWare for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:


Video link

Below is the raw surveillance footage of the attack on the border at Röszke, with annotations by Vlad:


Video link

Transcript of video #1:

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Alma Zadic Consorts With Salafists in Graz

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Last week Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff wrote about Alma Zadic, the new Austrian Minister of Justice. Ms. Zadic is a Bosnian Muslima and a politician for the Green Party who describes herself as a dedicated feminist. However, her visit last fall to a Bosnian Salafist mosque in Graz has caused some recent controversy, because the ideology espoused at the mosque could hardly be said to be supportive of the rights of women as they are understood in Austria or anywhere else in the West.

The following video presentation was recorded by a man named Irfan Peci. Mr. Peci was born in Serbia, and in the early 1990s, when he was still very small, his family moved to Germany to escape the Balkan wars. As a young man he was recruited by the local Al Qaeda affiliate in Germany, and worked for their propaganda organization. He was eventually arrested and imprisoned by the German authorities. While he was still in prison he was de-radicalized, and when he left prison became an undercover agent within Al Qaeda for the German government. After he was exposed, he wrote a book about his experiences and started producing videos.

Mr. Peci understands Bosnian, and knows the Salafist scene in Bosnia, so he was able to expose the Salafist connections with the mosque that Ms. Zadic visited. The fact that she also understands Bosnian highlights the disingenuousness of any assertions that she didn’t know what was going on in the Ihlas Mosque and Islamic Cultural Center in Graz.

Many thanks to MissPiggy for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:


Video link

Video transcript:

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The Transients of Bihac

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The following documentary about migrant camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina appeared recently on Hungarian TV. A reporter visited several immigrant camps in Bosnia, both official and unofficial (illegal), and talked to the residents there.

Bosnia is a mostly Islamic country, but that doesn’t mean the locals are happy about finding themselves deluged with culture-enrichers from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Just as in Western Europe, the invaders are almost all young men of military age. The fact that that they don’t want to stay in Bosnia, but long to continue onwards to greener pastures in Germany or Italy, provides little consolation for local residents who have to endure the depredations of the migrants.

The interviews with migrants seem mostly to have been conducted in English, with a voice-over in Hungarian. The interviews with the police and local residents are (presumably) in the local Bosniak dialect with a Hungarian voice-over.

Many thanks to CrossWare for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

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The Huddled Masses Yearn to Cross the Border Fence Into Hungary

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Hungary is currently experiencing a surge of migrants against its southern borders, the largest it has seen since the Great Migration Crisis of 2015. Its border with Serbia is now completely defended by a razor-wire fence, but recent arrivals have been digging tunnels under it and putting ladders up against it in their zeal to cross the border.

The video below was released by the Hungarian government. It shows numerous attempts, some of them successful, by people who want to cross into Hungary.

No one who wanted to enter the country honestly and legally would attempt to dig under the fence or scale it with a ladder. That means these new arrivals are invaders, rather than migrants. Hungarian border guards would be completely justified in shooting the invaders as soon as they put up their ladders or emerged from the tunnel under the fence. And they would only have to shoot a few of them; after that the traffickers would return to using the longer route through Croatia. But the Hungarians dare not do it.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video (hat tip László):


Video link

The following excerpts are from an ABC News article about the discovery of the tunnels under the fence:

Hungarian police find 2 tunnels used by migrants on border

Hungarian police say they have discovered two tunnels used by migrants to enter the country from Serbia

Hungarian police said Friday that they discovered two tunnels used by migrants to enter the country from Serbia.

Police said that a tunnel 34 meters (37 yards) long was discovered near the southern village of Asotthalom, where they also detained 44 migrants who had used the precarious passageway.

Police Col. Jeno Szilassi-Horvath said a Serbian citizen suspected of human trafficking had been detained along with the migrants.

The tunnel near Asotthalom was about 50 centimeters (20 inches) wide, 60 centimeters (2 feet) high, and had been dug as deep as about 6 meters (20 feet) below the surface without any support beams or other elements to prevent its collapse.

Szilassi-Horvath said the dig, which likely lasted a few weeks and was done without any machines, had gone undetected thanks to the thick underbrush in the area and because the soil dug out was dumped in a nearby canal.

He added that security officials were using drones and scanners to search for any more tunnels.

The other tunnel, in the village of Csikeria, was 21.7 meters (71 feet) long, but no successful migrant crossings took place there. Police said they discovered both tunnels not long after their construction was completed, and filled both of them up again.

See also Vlad’s report on the same topic.

Below are four more articles about the migration (invasion) surge at the borders of Hungary:

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Migrants Encouraged to Leave Bosnia — For the EU

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The New Balkan Route

The Bosnian government is providing incentives to induce residents of migrant camps to cross the border to Croatia illegally and thus enter the European Union.

Many thanks to MissPiggy for translating this article from Die Welt:

Curfew With Exceptions

Bosnian authorities encourage migrants to flee to EU border

The refugees in two large camps in Bosnia will be subject to a curfew as of Friday. If they decide to flee illegally across the border, then they will be allowed to leave the camp. The region is groaning under the rising number of refugees.

In effect since Friday, the regional government in the Bosnian canton of Una-Sana has imposed a curfew on migrants and refugees in two large camps. The inhabitants of the camps Bira in Bihac and Miral in Velika Kladusa are not allowed to leave these facilities unless they intend to flee illegally across the nearby border with Croatia, according to the decision of the cantonal government, according to information the media received.

According to observers, this is intended to encourage migrants to leave Bosnia for the EU. The cantonal government officially justified the curfew because of the “migratory pressure” in the region.

The two camps are run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which is one of the UN organisations. According to their information, a total of 2300 asylum seekers are accommodated there.

Many wait in miserable camps

However, it is estimated that there are around 7,000 migrants and refugees in Bihac and the surrounding area. Many of them stay in Vucjak, where a miserable improvised camp has been set up by the city of Bihac, in which migrants camp outdoors or live in private quarters.

Recently government officials promised new quarters in former military barracks. As winter approaches, helpers and activists fear a humanitarian catastrophe if no winter-proof shelters are created in the Bihac area.

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