One day, as we were walking by the river, two friends and I tried to maneuver this mess. November 2021 Rather, people I talked to often stressed that theywho themselves were shot at and made into refugees two decades agounderstood the refugee predicament. It is a game, after all. The local team barely won. Stores the traffic source or campaign that explains how the user reached your site. I walked its streets, measuring its silences and sensing the heaviness that often accompanies the proximity of human tragedies. Borii, a forested area near the largest migrant encampment in Biha at the time, became another conflicting space of lament and compassion, xenophobia and critique. Vujak etymologically stems from vukovi or wolfs, connoting a daunting space where wilderness and animals dominate over humans. In: Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal. [the Road of Shit!]. The rumor has it that the city government decided on this problematic location in order to provoke some response from the irresponsive Bosnian state and passive, hypocritical, and moralizing Europe. The situation in which hundreds of new people are coming through Biha daily trying to cross into Croatia, has overwhelmed the city of 45,000 inhabitants, which is already dealing with (post)war destruction, high poverty, extreme unemployment, and infrastructural ruination. Due to the proximity of the IOM-run migrant campa partially renovated ruin of the former student dormto the stadium, migrants became regular fans at these games. The container-style facility is located in a remote area where authorities last fall had forcibly moved hundreds of people from overcrowded EU-funded, UN-run camps in surrounding town centers due to the resistance of the local population. This is due to the citys proximity to Croatia, and thus to the European Union (EU), and because of the closing of borders and routes elsewhere in Europe. She is the author of Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (translated into Serbian Samo Bosne nema: mladi i graenje drave u posleratnoj Bosni i Hercegovini). Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. In parallel, the MoS would be enabled to efficiently manage the regular and irregular movement of people and take effective measures to prevent and suppress related illegal acts, while maintaining a high level of security for BiH citizens, migrants and visitors. While some people saw these practices as a desperate move of hungry people, others saw this as a sign and confirmation of their incivility and backwardness: It is possible they are eating [our] ducks. Theorizing the Contemporary. These city ducks, our ducks, are often (problematically) fed bread by the locals, especially children. The migrants were sometimes patrolled by the police and made to walk for six kilometers in a prisoner-style single file formation with their right hand on the shoulder of the man in front of them. Cambridge, Massachusetts. The river was not the only natural landmark around which tension born out of forced coexistence between the local population and migranti was articulated. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies. This painful overlapping and literal collapsing of the Bosnian wars most painful history of the Srebrenica genocide, when more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were captured and killed in three days by the Serb Army in the UN Safe Zone of Srebrenica in 1995, and the history of violence, exclusion, and despair that brought the shirt-wearing migrant to Biha was devastating; it created both a limit of the comprehensible and tolerable, and it marked an excess of suffering. For the most part, Biani (citizens of Biha) do not blame migranti for the overwhelming situation in their town.

This propelled some in Sarajevo to see the people in the Una-Sana Canton as traitors. As we left the stadium, we encountered another group of migrants walking towards us on their way to the Pljeivica Mountain. Palo Alto. This link between the perception of current danger and the pre-war atmosphere is only one of many ways in which people in Biha understand and live their new predicament. Modernity and Its Outcasts. Many of the people in the region felt this double, hypocritical nature of European care that was turning Biha into, as one acquaintance remarked, the European Gaza Strip. The Una River harbors many of these animals, which are consumed by the local people in the city as attractions, but never as food. Why Is Violence Against Women, Girls In Kyrgyzstan On The Rise? Used to determine new sessions/visits. We provide what many people cannot get locally: uncensored news, responsible discussion, and open debate. RFE/RL journalists report the news in 27languages in 23countries where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established. In: American Anthropologist 113(1).

But they are scolding us for not educating them! Bauman, Zygmunt (2003): Wasted Lives. They are mostly young males, products of war-generated violences and of savage sortingthe destruction of more traditional forms of capitalism by more advanced capitalist forms in much of the world (Sassen 2010). They recount ways in which the government in Sarajevo tries to channel migranti to Biha [and the rest of Una-Sana Canton in which Biha is located] just to get rid of them and send them to us. While some local residents protested this hunt on people, others in town welcomed this intervention. In that context, the Project is focused on further development and upgrade of MIS in order to ensure interoperability of existing and introduction of some new modules, such as online visa/residence permit application modul and online registration of short stayers in local police stations, connected within the central database and those operating in competent institutions. This cookie will be saved if you have accepted the cookie consent. The building remained eerie and skeleton-like for decades, a shadow and a symbol of the unmaterialized socialist past and the perpetually transitioning postwar present. At first, Bosnian authorities let migrants pass onto EU member Croatia, but Croatian authorities later sealed the border and reportedly resorted to pushbacks of migrants, leaving thousands of people stuck in Bosnia. This feeling of being neglected by Sarajevo was then linked to the experience during the war (1992-95), when the people in the besieged region of Biha felt similarly abandoned by the central government. The back of the shirt read: Srebrenica da se ne zaboravi genocide (Srebrenicanever forget genocide). She also co-edited a volume (with Monika Palmberger), titled Care Across Distance: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration. Ticktin, Miriam (2017): Introduction. This further aggravated the situation in the Biha region, which was split into two halves (a pro-government one and a pro-Abdi one) that started a war against each other. The meetings revolved around one main issue: education of migrant children from the nearby hotel Sedra. Even though I moved to the US in 1996, I continued to visit the town and its people and places annually, witnessing their often complicated postwar and postsocialist alterations. Is used to integrate the tracking tool Motomo (formerly Piwik) to count the number of visitors to our website and to measure the way in which it is used, with the aim of improving our pages and making interactive services available to visitors. In the local peoples opinion, their actions were, however, misunderstood and misinterpreted as anti-immigrant, even racist, and once again they felt abandoned. Login was not successful. The situation is further complicated due to the fact that many Biha people were refugees during the Bosnian war (1992-95) and thus (claim to) know what it is like to feel violently uprooted, displaced and unwanted. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 2022 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved. She is currently working on a new book that investigates riverine citizenship in northwestern Bosnia-Herzegovina. The issue arose when the children from the hotel had to start school. It is interesting my friend remarked, that they are using the same route to cross that we used to illegally cross into Croatia during the war to escape the siege. Asylum and International Protection s. n.(s. And we are actually the ones feeding the migrants and living with them, trying our best to coexist somehow. Commenting on this situation, another person told me: Did you know that Croatia closed the border crossing with Bosnia [the entry point near Velika Kladua, another town in the Canton with a big refugee and migrant population] for a few days because of the hectic migrant situation? MiS BiH: Enhancement of the Migration Information System (MIS) for Strengthening Migration, Asylum and Border Management in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Information measures and capacity building on asylum, legal and irregular migration in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Western Balkans (IKAM). Some are sleeping in larger groups next to each other, the bags, their only possessions, under their heads. These cookies help us make the siteas user-friendly as possible. Cambridge. The presence of IOM in Biha reminded people of the heavy yet complicated involvement of the international community in postwar reconstruction after the Bosnian war ended. They even bring here, to us, those migranti that never passed through Bosnia on their way to Europe. ): Una, Spring of Life. Stray dogs, another symbol of Bihas postwar transition, are roaming around them. Anand, Nikhil (2015): Accretion. The cookie is created when the javascript library executes and no existing __utmb cookies exists. These tragedies point at yet another non-linear historical twist: instead of the socialist worker-pensioners, who were supposed to age slowly and peacefully next to the florescent and calming Una River, the lives of young male migrants from the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa were being violently taken by its currents (Krajina.ba 2018; see Hromadi 2019). Immediately they began cooperating with Serb forces in Bosnia and Croatia which besieged the region for more than a year at the time. The project was funded by the EU with the help of individual European governments. First, the people used their experiences and memories of the Bosnian war to paint themselves as different, better, and more understanding than other states and nations, which mistreated and rejected migranti. As a local professor told me, no one expects this to last. URL: faktor.ba [20.08.2019]. Historically, this cookie operated in conjunction with the __utmb cookie to determine whether the user was in a new session/visit. Some of the most important symbols of Biha are its famous Una River and its surrounding trees and forests. We were all tense, confused. The new, organized Lipa camp, in the northwestern Krajina region, replaces a makeshift camp destroyed in a fire last December, leaving hundreds of migrants in the cold, with no facilities, heat, or food. In July 2019, I returned to Biha. Sassen, Saskia (2014): Expulsions. We use these cookies to analyze our websites access statistics, find out more about how our visitors use the site, and improve both the website and our services. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. I imagined this group, marching in their decomposing tennis shoes, sleeping in the snow-covered, landmine-decorated mountain that night. URL: culanth.org [29.10.2017]. The new reception center provides housing, food, water, sanitation, and medical care in line with international standards. Jedinstvo, the local team with long tradition, notable past and unremarkable present, was playing against the team from Herzegovina today. I was repeatedly told that the main target of the protest was not migranti but the Bosnian government in Sarajevo which is doing nothing for Biani who deal with the crisis daily.

Rethinking Notions of Otherness. This area, adjacent to the main soccer stadium, was forested by the socialist youth in the seventies and eighties of the last century. Soon, I learned that after more than a year of waiting for the Bosnian state, Europe, or any other actor to help them manage the migrant crisis, further propelled by several instances of violence between different, antagonistic migrant groups in town, in June 2019, the City of Biha and the Una-Sana Canton singlehandedly started forcefully removing migrants from their semi-licit, crowded, and in apt dwellings. Negotiating Agency and State Sovereignty in Postsocialist Serbia. I would not be surprised if they were to start eating each other, whispered one local man (Degirmendi 2018). On an exceptionally warm and sunny afternoon, a friend and I were watching a soccer game at the main stadium in Biha. The Bosnian war(s) and the current predicament of refugees and migrants from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia found their convergences in other unexpected and historically potent ways. But both sides are accusing us to be racist and xenophobic. One and only! (s.n. In the fall of 2018, a series of meetings took place between the Cantonal Minister of Education in Biha and the parents of children enrolled in the elementary school Brekovica in the village with the same name located some eight miles from Biha. Their few possessions will be taken. It is here that the overlap of dispersed peripheriesGaza and Biha - and postwar, postsocialist, postcolonial, and imperial geographies and histories, forcefully converged to challenge our analytic vocabularies, research methodologies, and attempts to create clean categories of analysis. The towns population changed drastically during the war and so did its streets, which transformed from places of tireless social gathering to ghostly zones of abandonment (Biehl 2005) covered with human waste (Bauman 2003) and non-human rubble (Stoler 2008). Rather, they avoid certain routes and create new ones. The game was painful to watch: the quality of the team was declining together with the city itself. Months of this bubbling emotion lead to a protest in October 2018. We do not go out much at night. Degirmendi, Semira (2018): Migranti rotiljaju patke na Uni, Biani zgroeni. The IOM, following its twisted logic of humanitarianism, committed to repairing some of the stadiums decaying infrastructure and has already begun with the works. One of them wore a white shirt given to him from who knows whom. Today, Biha looks different. It will be run by Bosnias Service for Foreigner Affairs with help from the International Organization for Migration, UN agencies, and nongovernmental organizations. We were saying: This cannot be happening to us! That is how it is now. In this account, I attempt to capture some of these dynamics by focusing on multiple encounters between the people of Biha and migranti with a special focus on the local peoples perspectives. In: Social Research: An International Quarterly 84(1). You know what it is like? I witnessed a painful, material, and deeply visceral transformation of an industrial, socialist, and relatively progressive town into a town choked by a three and a half year-long siege. s. a., page 1)., The phrase future past is the construction of Reinhart Koselleck (2004), a historical theorist who in his famous work Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time explores, among other things, the experiences of the past that impose modernity., The camp was indeed closed on December 10, 2019. inclusive education. And then they will try again, sometimes over ten times, until they finally reach what one refugee called a place of peace in the Fortress Europe, which is decorated with the discourse of human rights and politics of barbwire. Until recently, this was done by international organizations," said Bosnian Minister of Security Selmo Cikotic. One day, my friend and colleague, who also lives and teaches abroad, was passing by Borii (Small Pines), a forested area near the then largest migrant encampment in Biha. Migrants took naps and rested next to these graves, creating novel historical intimacies and layers of bones and flesh, cement and grass, visible and invisible names, lives and deaths. This propels many to help migranti (migrants) while simultaneously wishing them gone. This is due to the citys proximity to Croatia and thus the European Unions (EU) border, and because of the closing of borders and routes elsewhere in Europe.

I was 16 years old when my home town was violently besieged by the Serb army; a blockade that would last for over three years. Uguio se migrant prilikom kupanja u Uni. No one in Biha could tell me how many people on the move were there exactlysome local Red Cross workers estimated that there are around 5,000 individuals in Biha at the moment, but others saw that number as too high., Bihas Partisan Cemetery was built after WWII in honor of the Yugoslav Partisans of Biha who were killed during WWII. Many local people were aware of this, but once they were faced with the problem of migrant children attending their school, they threatened to pull their children out of school. These painful, unexpected and highly visible convergences of seemingly incongruent bodies and souls, political bureaucracies, resistance, diplomatic strategies, humanitarian regimes, and economic calculations revealed new world orders, encounters, and experiences.