Some 450 people from 20 organisations acting within the Mountain Rescue Service (GSS) of Bosnia and Herzegovina are performing demanding rescue tasks every day, in hard-to-reach places, in caves, underwater and other areas. However, they say the law does not recognise them.

“We’re a non-governmental organisation (NGO), a non-profit organisation, volunteers, amateurs, even though I hate using the word amateur because we’re dealing with saving people’s lives,” Head of the GSS Zdenko Maric told FENA news agency.

“We’re always the first responders in the field. If a person is missing, and if there are no elements of crime there, the police always call the GSS because we have the answers to situations when the state doesn’t. However, legally, we don’t exist,” Maric stressed.

“Only some individual GSS organisations are now being built into the Civil Protection Service at the local level, but the contracts they’re offered are nowhere near as adequate as they should be for the service to develop properly.”

He pointed out that when it comes to mountain rescue services two opposing concepts are being used in the region. The Eastern concept which states that mountain rescue activities should be performed by state institutions and the Western concept used by most EU countries, where mountain rescue services are performed by NGOs.

The Western concept, he said, is used in Croatia, Slovenia, Czech Republic and almost the entire Europe. Mountain rescue services in those countries are NGOs who gained the right to perform this type of service through state laws, but no such law exists in Bosnia.