If migrants enter BiH uncontrollably, how would the country stop terrorists?

BiH, (Patria) - The Mayor of Bihać Šuhret Fazlić held a meeting yesterday with representatives of several state institutions and organizations due to the increasing number of refugees/migrants in this city. 

He stated that before the meeting he was paranoid, and now he is panicking. Fazlić said that the City of Bihać and the Una-Sana Canton are powerless to deal with the migrant problem on their own. There is no data on how many of these people are in Bihać, as well as in other BiH cities, nor is there a clear plan on how to help these people and accommodate them in controlled conditions.

“This is a humanitarian and security problem“, Fazlić told reporters.

Migrants coming to BiH are mostly from war-torn countries in the Middle East.

Border police officers are lacking 

Experts are particularly concerned that the police agencies of Bosnia and Herzegovina do not have an exact number of migrants who have entered the country. The BiH Border Police does not have a precise database of migrants who have crossed the BiH border.

Jasmin Ahić, a professor at the Faculty of Criminal Justice, Criminology and Security Studies in Sarajevo, told the Patria news agency that the migrant wave has confirmed that the Border Police cannot "cover" the entire border of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which represents a security problem for citizens. He believes this is primarily because the Border Police is short several hundred border police officers, but also due to other unresolved issues.

“The BP is short 550 people“, said Ahić, adding that the terrain of the BiH border, much of which runs through mountains, also affects the quality of border control.

“The BP has two new actions: deterring migrants as the first standard measure, and then controlling every vehicle entering BiH, which is exhausting for border police officers who are short about 30 percent of personnel at these crossings“, says Ahić, explaining why some migrants can cross the BiH border unnoticed.

Poor staffing decisions

The migrant problem in BiH has confirmed suspicions that BiH borders are not fully protected, and that the country is also threatened by potential terrorist threats, which experts have been warning about for some time.

Furthermore, experts are additionally concerned that BiH authorities still do not have a plan on how to close the border in a way that would minimize illegal crossings, which indicates that the country will have porous borders for some time to come.

BiH media also report on poor staffing decisions within the BiH Border Police, as well as on non-transparent recruitment into that police agency. The non-governmental sector warns that the selection of the heads of that agency, as well as other state agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is based on political rather than professional competence. This is, in fact, the key generator of problems that manifest later. 

The latest case that has shaken the BiH Border Police is the suspicion of missing sniper scopes and ammunition from the BP warehouse.

A group of employees in the BiH BP has accused the Director of the Border Police, Zoran Galić, and official Vladimir Popović, as well as some of their former associates, of the disappearance of optical sights/sniper scopes, as well as several thousand rounds of ammunition from the BP warehouse. Because of this, Hanka Vajzović, a representative of the Democratic Front (DF) in the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has requested an urgent statement from the Minister of Security, Dragan Mektić, on this case, while Šemsudin Mehmedović, a representative and member of the Joint Committee for Defense and Security, has requested that this case also involve that committee of the State Parliament.