Croatia’s brutal treatment and pushbacks of migrants and asylum seekers along its border with Bosnia and Herzegovina has been widely documented for several years, with the most recent reports revealing systematic destruction of migrants’ belongings, including cell phones and identity papers. The country has also expanded its immigration enforcement infrastructure with the opening in late 2023 of a “migrants reception and processing centre” in abandoned military barracks in Krnjak municipality.
“Burn piles”
In late October, photos and other documentary emerged revealing Croatian border police “burning clothing, mobile phones and passports seized from asylum seekers attempting to cross into the European Union before pushing them back to Bosnia,” according to The Guardian. The evidence, much of it contained in report by the NGO No Name Kitchen(NKK), is the latest in a series of reports dating back several years attesting to Croatia’s draconian response to the migration challenges confronting it and the rest of Europe.
According to the NKK report “Burned Borders,” between October 2023 and August 2024, the group uncovered numerous secret police locations called “burn piles” where officials “destroy the personal belongings of people attempting to migrate for a better life.” The group also recorded testimony from victims that include “accounts of the Croatian border police stripping people of their belongings to burn in front of them.” NKK claims that their report provides “direct depictions of how the EU and more directly Croatian border police attempt to cover up the evidence of the violence that they are committing.”
Similar reports have repeatedly surfaced in recent years. In 2020, the Danish Refugee Council released a dossier of testimonies and photos that Al Jazeera reported demonstrated “severe injuries” that refugees suffered “after having allegedly been whipped, beaten and sexually abused at the hands of Croatian authorities during their attempts to reach western Europe for asylum.” The evidence marked “an escalation with reports of sexual abuse and ‘extreme violence,’” according to the news outlet.
The violence prompted UNHCR to issue a statement at the time about “deep concern” over the increasing number of reports it was receiving about the brutal treatment of asylum seekers in Croatia, stating: ‘‘Our organisation has previously received and subsequently shared with the authorities credible reports of people who claim they have been unlawfully returned from Croatia to Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. … These reports highlight problems regarding the identification of asylum claims, violence and excessive use of force, identification of vulnerable individuals, treatment of unaccompanied children.”
The following year, in 2021, the French newspaper Liberation released video footage showing Croatian border guards severally beating migrants along its borders. Although EU Home Affairs Commissioner Yiva Johansson called the reports “shocking” and said she was “extremely concerned,” Amnesty International countered by saying that the EU executive was continuing “to turn a blind eye to the staggering breach of EU law, and even continues to fund police and border operations in some of these countries.” ¨
In May 2023, Human Rights Watch issued its report “‘Like We Were Just Animals’: Pushbacks of People Seeking Protection from Croatia to Bosnia and Herzegovina,” which detailed how the EU had abetted the abuse and pushbacks of thousands of migrants during the 2020-2022 period, contributing “substantial funds to Croatian border management without securing meaningful guarantees that Croatia’s practices adhere to international human rights norms and comply with EU law.”
The rise of violent smuggling gangs
The pattern of abuses has led to an uptick in the operations of often-violent smuggling gangs, according to a recent report from Balkan Insight. The news outlet cites a number of experts who argue that as the Croatia and other countries in the Balkans have increased the use of harsh measures, the migrant route stretching from Turkey to Western Europe “has grown increasingly violent.” The harsh measures, they argue, “are driving desperate asylum seekers into the hands of smugglers who put profits first and do not hesitate to defend their turf with arms. Violent incidents [ between smugglers and police] are becoming increasingly common.”
Caught in the crossfire are the migrants. In one case in late 2023, “an Afghan man was found heavily wounded near a reception centre in Lipa, near the Croatian border, and later died in hospital. Three weeks later, an 18-year-old Afghan was arrested in connection with the case. Around the same time, also in Lipa, a Syrian migrant was fatally stabbed and another wounded, while in May a migrant suffered gunshot wounds in Sarajevo.”
In a recent report, the Border Violence Monitoring Network (September 2024) underscores the growing impact of counter-smuggling operations on migrants, which the group argues is leading to the growing “criminalisation of people on the move”: “In the past several months, there has been a huge increase in the number of people arrested by Croatian authorities under accusations of smuggling. From January to September 2024, 1,430 individuals have been arrested, an increase of more than 40% in arrests of this kind, compared to the same period of last year. Meanwhile, the authorities also report a 60% drop in the ‘interception’ of people on the move at their borders, an euphemism used by the authorities to obscure the practice of illegal pushbacks in the country, invoking a false idea that someone can be arbitrarily expelled from the country if ‘found and intercepted’ at the border.
“These statistics raise concerns regarding the potential increasing criminalisation of movement by Croatian authorities, whereby individuals from groups transiting across the border might be accused of smuggling, on the basis of arbitrary criteria and just because they have crossed the border. This policy acts as a way to punish and deter migration. In a conversation with a Collective Aid team in Sarajevo, a person on the move described the experience of a violent and degrading pushback. He explained that, before the pushback, three members of the transit group were separated from the others, and arrested on the grounds of being “wanted persons” The other members of the group had lost all contact with them.”
New Migrant Reception and Proecessing Centre
The Croatian government announced in late 2023 that it intended to open a secure “Migrant Reception and Processing Centre” at an abandoned military barracks on Skradska Gora, near Dugo Dol, Krnjak municipality. The facility, which the government has sought EU financing to operate, reportedly uses storage containers “to facilitate the enforcement of procedures for monitoring irregular movements and registering applicants for international protection” (HPC 2024).
There are contradictory reports about how the facility operates. “Unofficial reports” cited by the Croatia Law Centre in late 2023 claimed that “the centre is not intended to be a detention centre, but will serve as centre for short-term accommodation and registration.” However, during a press conference announcing the opening of the centre, the mayor of the nearby town Barilovici said the centre will be provide “controlled arrival, stay and departure.” Explaining the need for the new facility, the chief of the local police said: “Illegal migration in the territory of Karlovac … is on the rise. Our capacities for receiving and registering migrants have become too small. That’s why we are looking for a location where we can do this work more appropriately and better, so that we can have migrants under even better supervision.”
Croatia operates three dedicated immigration detention centres, though it terms two of them (in Tirlj and Tovarnik) “Transit Reception Centres.” The country’s main pre-removal detention facility is in Jezevo, 30 kilometers from Zagreb. According to the most recent AIDA report produced by the Croatian Law Centre, the Jezevo facility “has capacity to accommodate 68 men, 12 women and 15 vulnerable persons. The special wing for vulnerable groups in Ježevo was finalised at the end of 2015 in order to detain women, families and unaccompanied children.
In 2018, Croatia’s Border Directorate of the Ministry of Interior informed the Croatian Law Centre that “places of deprivation of liberty for the accommodation of irregular migrants also include airport transit zones and premises in police stations.” Croatia operates “special premises” in “Zagreb Airport at Dubrovnik Airport (6 places), while at other airports that are intended to facilitate international departures and also to briefly detain people denied entry. “The total number of police stations at the end of 2018 was 184, while the total number of places where migrants can be detained in police stations is 162.”
