ARE WE HUMANE OR ARE WE LYING TO OURSELVES? Evacuees from Gaza blackmailed into living in a new camp to receive state aid!

By: Rasim Belko

Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina and their relatives from Palestine, evacuated from Gaza and arrived in BiH yesterday, have been placed in Salakovac and blackmailed into staying there until the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina provides them with temporary accommodation.

State-level officials are passing the buck and confusing both the people in Salakovac and the entire public. The director of the Service for Foreigners' Affairs, Žarko Laketa, told us that they are free people, with the only obligation to report to the nearest Service for Foreigners' Affairs field office. However, Minister Sevlid Hurtić says that anyone who wants to leave Salakovac must sign a statement accepting that the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is no longer obliged to help them.

Therefore, BiH citizens, and especially their relatives currently in Salakovac, are BLACKMAILED into staying there so as not to lose their right to state-provided food and other necessities. To clarify, a BiH citizen who has secured accommodation in Sarajevo, if they wish to go to their own accommodation, must sign a statement forfeiting their right to state-provided temporary accommodation and living assistance.

This is a question for the Ombudsman for Human Rights and all other competent authorities, because it is obvious that the state is flagrantly violating all rights of the people accommodated in Salakovac, not allowing them to temporarily go to secured accommodation in the capital while the state finds something else. Salakovac is a camp, and information about the possibility of entering/exiting the reception center is contradictory.

Are we as humane as we wanted to convey at the beginning of the conflict in the Middle East with messages on social networks and media? We are not, we are lying to ourselves, because if we were humane, our millionaires would be competing to provide accommodation, pocket money, and everything else needed. If we were humane, our politicians would ensure that the state, through social services and institutions, provides food, but not in a reception center, but in a normal environment that at least resembles a home.

If we were humane, we would have started the action ourselves. We know we can, but it is unclear to me why we are not doing it. Humanitarian organizations have failed, and I will say religious communities too, because people who until yesterday feared for their very lives, crammed into some basements while death and hell were happening around them, we have placed in a kind of camp in the middle of nowhere.

And I remember that during the peak of the migrant crisis, when thousands of unfortunate people were arriving in Sarajevo from the east, we provided everything they needed.

The question is why we were so unprepared to receive a few dozen of our citizens and their relatives. The answer is clear, the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina is unprepared even for current affairs, and crises expose that unpreparedness in the worst possible way.

We were late with the evacuation of citizens compared to many other countries, and due to someone's stubbornness, the decision to allow their entry into BiH was delayed, and when they thought their biggest worries were behind them, they ended up in a refugee center with minimal living conditions.

Croatia evacuated its citizens before us, and I could not find information that they took them to a readmission, refugee, or some other center. So, we had an example of how it is done, but we did not learn.

Or perhaps the problem is that among those 37 unfortunate people there are also Palestinians who are not citizens of BiH, so someone wants to demonstrate power over them. Or maybe to launder money, it's not that we haven't witnessed similar situations.

And while our head of diplomacy says one thing, the ministers of security and human rights and refugees say another, the head of the Service for Foreigners' Affairs says a third, we can only watch with disbelief that the only option for evacuated BiH citizens and their Palestinian relatives to be free is if they sign that they will be hungry.

We have failed as a society and forgotten that many countries in Europe, as well as in the East, received our refugees not as migrants in asylum centers, but in accommodation suitable for people fleeing war. And they did not blackmail them; on the contrary, they had all the assistance of those countries until they “stood on their own feet”.

In the end, the whole story about Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina understanding Palestine turned out to be hypocritical, because if that were the case, we would not have placed them in a detention hole to languish on this rainy November day, waiting for someone to bring them a jacket or a bowl of food.

And few will blush with shame after all this, because shame comes from humanity, not from hypocrisy and arrogance!