Rashid is in slippers and Abdallah is holding a pair of rain boots just delivered by staff at the European Union-funded Lipa reception camp in Bosnia, surrounded by snow. «We left Morocco two years ago and followed the Balkan route» explain the young men who came to enjoy the sun outside the camp. Then they add with a radiant smile: «If Allah wants we will arrive in Italy, in Venice», which they indicate on their cell phone thanks to Google Maps.
In Lipa they refresh themselves and have a bed guaranteed with three meals a day as well as warm clothing and shoes for the winter. So they can attempt “the game”, as they call it, the last stage of the Balkan route up to Trieste by illegally crossing the Croatian and Slovenian borders. From the fenced camp of white housing containers, located in the middle of the woods in the north-west of Bosnia, they can come and go whenever they want by getting into one of the authorized taxis that await the migrants to take them to the border.
From January to mid-November, 8,800 irregulars from Bosnia were tracked down by the police in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, half compared to last year. A source of Panorama who monitors traffic in the canton of Bihac explains that “illegals off the radar can be up to 50 percent more”. The “ghosts” reappear along the axis of the A4 motorway from Trieste to the Lombard capital. For this reason, the competent councilors of Milan, Brescia, Bergamo, Monza, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Venice and Udine signed an appeal letter sent to all parliamentarians. «The Balkan route does not have its own port and is not characterized by the shocking images of hundreds of people hanging on to the fate of a ship, but this does not mean it is less tragic and has less impact on the national territory» write the administrators. The news is that apart from the Venetian capital, they are all cities led by the centre-left.
«For years we have been witnessing an increase in people who, crossing the Trieste border, then flock to our cities» they write. «We are therefore keen to raise attention to the need to strengthen the management of the Balkan route, combining institutional forces and offering a structured response for this type of asylum seekers who currently crowd our offices and – unfortunately – our streets».
The idea started from Padua, with a municipal council that has always defended open doors. “The bipartisan appeal is positive in a country that has chosen an ideological rather than a pragmatic approach: on the one hand let’s welcome them all and on the other let’s all out” he explains to Panorama the councilor for social cohesion of the Municipality of Venice, Simone Venturini. “We are all concentrated on the sea front, forgetting that there is another irregular access route, the Balkan route.” Those migrants «seem like ghosts for the State, except when they approach local administrations – the councilor points out. «The cities of the North, however, are directly touched by that “borderline” humus around stations or neighborhoods transformed into bivouacs, which represents an important aspect of illegality». In Udine, the centre-left mayor Alberto Felice De Toni raises the problem of unaccompanied foreign minors arriving from the route or from Albania and Kosovo. “The majority are 17 and a half years old,” he explains. «The practice of taking an x-ray of the wrist to ascertain age is complicated and often overlooked. The result is that the cases of minors who are perhaps already adults are increasing. The legislation should be addressed.” The much debated law bears the name of Senator Sandra Zampa, former vice-president of the Democratic Party.
The appeal of the mayors of the A4 on the Balkan route was cited by the MP Rachele Scarpa, who, addressing the government, declared: «Their cry for help must be heard, these are numbers that are difficult to intercept and register because there is no management national. Pretending not to see does not reduce the phenomenon.” Scarpa is a reception extremist, who on 10 December joined the conference organized by the CGIL in Rome to present a report on detention centers for repatriations. The objective is to urge the opposition forces «of the need to close the infinite and unsuccessful season of administrative detention (in the CPR, ed) and of the special law for foreigners”. Scarpa, as a member of the Contact Group on Immigration of Parliamentarians, was on a delegation to Albania on 17 October to visit and loudly ask for the closure of the Shëngjin and Gjadër centres. The former mayor of Monfalcone, a Northern League member of the European Parliament, thinks the opposite. After a mission in Bosnia, on 5 December, he addressed a letter of complaint to the Austrian European Commissioner, Magnus Brunner, for Internal Affairs and Migration.
«I am writing to bring to your attention a very serious situation which concerns the management of migratory flows on the Balkan route” reads the letter. «To experience the reality first-hand, I went to Bihac and visited the Lipa camp, a structure financed with European taxpayer funds. What I saw was unacceptable: a center that, instead of curbing and discouraging the phenomenon, has transformed itself into a logistical base for those who intend to illegally cross our external borders.”
Alì, a boy who comes from Afghanistan, reveals the price for the last stretch of the Balkan route from the Una Sana canton of Bihac: «My brother who has three restaurants in London pays the traffickers three thousand euros to let me cross the border with Croatia , first on foot and then there will be cars.” Four Congolese come out of the Lipa camp with backpacks and heavy jackets: “The game, the game… we’re leaving for Italy now.”
One of them admits that he has already tried four times, but the Croatians sent him back rudely. Well equipped, thanks to the Lipa support point, financed by the EU, they have the routes, indicated by the traffickers via Google map, on their mobile phones. The small group gets into a taxi and the biggest one raises his thumb to reiterate that this time they will arrive in Trieste.
Official data indicate that since the beginning of the year, 22,363 migrants have been registered in Bosnia and 11,920 have passed through Lipa. In the last six years there have been 169,749, almost all of whom arrived illegally in Europe via the Balkan route. In the evening, in the desolate center of Bihac, the “facilitators” appear, each by ethnicity. The Maghrebi, the Pakistani and the African glued to their cell phones to coordinate the movements and passages of migrants. The OAS, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s intelligence and security agency, monitored human trafficking. Thanks to migrants’ cell phones and money tracking, a “network of Italian and also German citizens in Germany, with foreign origins, who manage traffic along the Balkan route” was identified. Frontex, until October, had reported only 17 thousand migrants, a drop of 79 percent compared to 2023. A comforting figure, but the “ghosts” of the Balkan route then reach the cities of the A4.
“The issue is complex and must be resolved by getting everyone around a table with the Ministry of the Interior” observes the mayor of Udine. «It takes collaboration and professionalism. It is very difficult for those who find themselves managing it directly like us mayors on the front line.” n © all rights reserved
