Bosnia cannot tackle the migrant crisis unless its leaders reach a consensus on stopping them at the border with Serbia, the head of Bosnia’s Service for Foreigners' Affairs told N1 on Tuesday.
“Migrants transit through these (regional) countries swiftly and Bosnia and Herzegovina is, unfortunately, on the border with Croatia and they cannot go further,” Slobodan Ujic explained, adding that the migrants are becoming aggressive because they are not able to continue their path.“There is a lot of disturbance of public order and peace, they commit crimes. A lot of them consume alcohol and drugs, that is why they are more aggressive.”
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Ujic said Bosnia must start tackling the source of the problem, which is “the border with our eastern neighbours.”
“We see how many of them enter through that border on a daily basis. We must be aware than until we close that border we will have the problem of illegal migrants here, and the biggest problem will be in the Una-Sana Canton, the Sarajevo Canton and the Tuzla Canton,” he said.
Ujic said that the Service for Foreigners’ Affairs does everything it is supposed to and that it collects data and tries to confirm their identity to send the migrants back to the countries they entered Bosnia from through the readmission programme.
But he stressed that there are many obstacles in this process.
“Those migrants arrive in Sarajevo, at temporary reception centres, without any police agencies stopping them on that path,” he said.
“Since the beginning of the year, we mostly have migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco etc. We have a problem with these countries in that we can’t get access to their database, they don’t exist. This readmission programme has had absolutely no effect so far,” he explained.
In order to return migrants to their country of origin, those countries must first confirm that they are their citizens and send a note of consent to receive them.
“There is no country in Europe that has managed to succeed and return all illegal migrants to their country of origin,” Ujic said.
He also complained that the Service for Foreigners’ Affairs has been operating with the same budget and number of staff members for five years already – “as if there was no migrant crisis.”
