'From Mujahideen to Migrants: Imported Problems of Bosniaks'

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - A group of about 30 migrants passed through the Banjaluka settlement of Lazarevo on Monday evening, accompanied by police.
ATV reported that the migrants were moving from the direction of the city towards the outskirts, and the police were escorting them in a car.

Milorad Dodik, Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina and President of SNSD, the ruling political party in Republika Srpska, an entity in BiH, has long held his uncompromising stance that no migrant can be held on the territory of Republika Srpska, after which the police only escort migrants entering RS from Serbia to the administrative border with the Federation of BiH, another BiH entity.

Dodik had previously expressed the conviction that Bosniaks generated the story about migrants and that they look favorably upon the migrant wave coming and do not want to be part of the solutions and measures that BiH should take.

"They don't want to because they are people of the same faith and, after all, that has been shown in Sarajevo as well, because in many parts of it there are already significant concentrations of people from the Middle East, who came earlier and are establishing their settlements. Therefore, this could not happen without some policy that is in agreement with it," Dodik said in an interview for RTL, which was published in May last year.

Numerous political parties as well as non-governmental organizations in the Federation are protesting Dodik's behavior during the migrant crisis, calling it shameful that Dodik is using the migrant crisis that has engulfed BiH, in which migrants and refugees, as well as the local population, suffer equally, to raise inter-ethnic tensions.

The director of the International Institute for Middle Eastern and Balkan Studies IFIMES from Ljubljana, Zijad Bećirović, believes that Dodik's policy in the face of the migrant crisis in the region is not a product of his arbitrary imagination, but, according to Bećirović, "it is about the conscious and systemic creation of a fictitious Islamic threat in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was already seen during the war in BiH," when warriors from the Middle East were brought into the country, although the Army of RBiH had no need for them.

"By introducing mujahideen into the ranks of the Army of RBiH, an attempt was made to discredit the liberation struggle of the Army, and to prepare the ground for strengthening the negotiating position and emphasizing one's own role in the defense of Europe from the Islamic threat, even though they themselves created that fictitious threat," says Bećirović in a comment for the Patria agency, noting that no warrior from the Middle East could enter BiH without the knowledge of foreign intelligence services, primarily the intelligence services of the neighboring countries of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while some of them, such as the Croatian intelligence service, assesses the director of IFIMES, were also involved in recruiting these foreign soldiers.

Today, Bećirović assesses, a fictitious Islamic threat is being consciously and systematically recreated in BiH through the fate of unfortunate migrants and refugees who are trying to reach Western countries by transiting through BiH.