Balkan route: The Survivors of the Border (2/6)

This portfolio article is the first in a series looking at the human consequences of the outsourcing of European migration policies to the Balkans, entitled: “Rivers are deadly if you’re not on the right side”. It was first published on Mediapart, Le Courrier des Balkans and visioncarto.net. Our warmest thanks to the visionscarto team for their work in proofreading and editing this text.

In the spring of 2024, I brought the CartoMobile to the outskirts of the Lipa and Borići camps. In a converted truck, this on-board research device enables me to bring participatory mapping workshops to exiled people caught in the meshes of the border. My aim is to include these people in the representation of their own narrative, where migration policies encourage their sidelining, invisibilization, silencing.

The CartoMobile functions as a space for creation and work, adapted to intellectual reflection and self-expression; it is also a space for respite and rest, when the violence of the border context imposes it (absence of intimate space, eviction, deprivation of shelter) [2].

In Lipa and Borići, all the people I have welcomed in the CartoMobile had been affected by gradual institutional violence during their journey to Europe. My presence in these places generated a word-of-mouth reaction: I was identified as someone writing about border issues and their violence. As a result, some of the people encamped there came to meet me to tell me about their game [3]. From these numerous testimonies, a unanimous phrase emerged: “Police of Croatia: problem!".

Getting pushed back, away from
the law and out of sight

The inhabitants of Bihać are at advanced posts to observe the repressive practices of the Croatian police (see

The recorded illegal removals go even further: they openly violate the European Convention on Human Rights (which prohibits collective expulsions on motives which are not individualized) and the 1951 Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which in itself should guarantee the principle of non-refoulement. According to this principle, states are prohibited from returning an individual to a country where his or her life or freedom is seriously threatened – i.e. if the individual is at risk of persecution, torture or degrading treatment on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Non-refoulement implies that all requests for asylum must be registered, and that the person making the request must be protected while his or her application is examined.

This text is included in the acquis communautaire and secondary legislation on asylum, with which both European institutions and Member States must comply. Nonetheless asylum requests expressed in Croatian border regions are not taken into account, as all testimonies concur in affirming. People seeking protection are well aware of this, and many have experienced it first-hand during their own refoulement: the aim of the game at this border is not simply to enter Croatian territory, but to reach the capital, Zagreb, where current practices are reputed to be more respectful of the right to asylum.

B*, a young Syrian who had just been turned back to Bihać despite his request for asylum to the Croatian police, put it simply: it is “a strange game, a completely crazy game!”. When we met, he was stunned by the idea that an institution could act so openly illegally on European soil.

A word has become widespread to describe the increasingly frequent refoulements carried out outside legal framework: pushback. Its variation, “to get pushed back”, has also become commonplace. The Balkan-based Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) estimates that the term first appeared with the mass illegal returns from Croatia and Hungary to Serbia from 2016 onwards [5]., when the official Balkan migration corridor closed [6].

More generally, pushbacks are used in all chain removals from Austria to the southern Balkans – as documented notably by the Push back alarm Austria initiative from 2021. Illegal refoulements have also been widely observed at the internal borders of the Schengen area: in France, the Association nationale d’assistance aux frontières pour les étrangers (Anafé) publishes numerous reports on the subject [7]. At the French-Italian border in particular, the recurrent practice led to a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union on September 21, 2023 [8].

The corollary of pushbacks is the outpouring of violence made possible by the absence of rights. There have been countless reports by researchers [9], associations [10] and institutions [11] documenting the violence perpetrated by police forces in the Balkan states, particularly since 2016 and the closure of the formal Balkan corridor. Now, the thousands of stories collected add up to a sum. Those compiled by the BVMN network can be consulted in an online database and an open-access Black Book of Pushbacks [12], a truly painstaking effort to reconstruct the sequence of events and their massive nature.

The first Black Book, published in 2020, listed 12,000 cases of violence, depicted on 1,500 pages; the second edition of the Black Book, published two years later, in 2022, counted 25,000 cases on 3,000 pages of description (more than double).

The map below spatializes these acts of violence and attempts to reveal, behind the numbers, the individuality of the people who gave their testimony – whose identities are anonymized by the drawing [13].

Detailed testimonies, compiled by BVMN according to a precise methodology, report various types of violence: insults; beatings; blows and injuries; theft, confiscation and destruction of property; dog attacks; armed threats; mutilation. Some practices are particularly inventive: intimidation and humiliation, such as marking people with a cross of red paint on the head [14], or forced undressing. They also deliberately endanger people by forcing them to swim out to sea or into icy rivers.

Testimonies go as far as allegations of rape and torture, which have been relayed by Amnesty International, among others, and taken up in court rulings. For example, in January 2021, the Court of Rome issued a judgment in favour of a claimant who had been subjected to illegal chain-removal between Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, based on the testimony he had given to BVMN [15]. This work by civil society volunteers has become a necessity for documenting the facts, in the absence of any investigation by the public authorities.

Survivors of a European geostrategy of violence

Dismissal, refusal, expulsion, refoulement or pushbacks... Words cannot express the indelible imprint of these experiences of violence. Nor can numbers measure the impact of these inhuman and degrading practices. But in the presence of the people it affects, this widespread violence takes on a consistency: that of the countless traces left by pushbacks on bodies and in traumatic narratives.

In Borići and Lipa, everyone carries with them, or on them, a story of physical or psychological violence endured. M* has an injured leg from his last attempt to enter Croatia, and can no longer afford to walk, in the absence of proper examination and care. For T*, his life’s work and dreams were shattered at the Croatian border: “My boxing career came to an end because the Croatian police injured my right and left knees”.
His mental strength enables him to put things into perspective: “There are those who have become completely unable to walk, and this continues to happen here in Bosnia”. F* says he has suffered violence at the hands of the Croatian police, which he does not allow himself to detail. E* explains that music gives him the strength not to go mad.

Far from the miserabilist or victimizing portrayals – which would have us believe that people who are violently repressed are victims by nature, when in fact they are victims of clearly identifiable legislation, systems and practices [16] - it is important to take the time to ask a simple question: who are the people targeted by such violence?

“Here, you could write a book about everyone”. As R*, one of the men I met in Lipa, suggests, migratory journeys are rich and plural. The routes differ, whether you come from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa. The socio-economic profiles range from the unemployed, to students, to the qualified; in Lipa, you’ll find a cook, an economist, an engineer, a musician, a professional boxer... The taxi drivers know it well: “Among them, you’ll find highly educated people, graduates, even professors”.

These multiple experiences show that it is pointless to compare the reasons for departure: people flee wars as much as persecutions, or social and political contexts that make a decent life impossible.
Another disturbing trend is that many of the people blocked in the canton of Una-Sana have already spent time in EU member states, sometimes for several years, before new physical and administrative barriers were erected. These are the result of tougher legislations introduced with the construction of the Schengen area in the 2000s. Control is now exercised upstream of the Schengen area, from the moment a Schengen visa application is submitted in the country of departure; it then extends to all transit countries, where EU-funded control systems are outsourced; finally, administrative barriers are put in place following forced returns to the country of origin, for example via bans from European territory.

For Schengen, a Welcoming World and an ’Undesirable’ World.

Map: Philippe Rekacewicz

J* tells me that he lived legally in France in the 1990s, where part of his family still lives, before returning to Tunisia; to make the same journey again twenty years later, he had to take an illegal route through Turkey, Bulgaria, Northern Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he is now at a standstill. For his part, X* was able to work for two years in Italy after leaving Morocco; he was then deported to Serbia, from where he resumed his journey towards Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro, where I met him before he in turn joined one of the IOM camps in Bosnia.

These stories illustrate that people caught in the “buffer-zone” of the Balkan borders are subject to a gradual process of “illegalization [17]”. As Steffen Mau rightly writes, a “cascade of borders” stands in front of those who take the Balkan routes [18]. But this multiplied border operates beyond the Balkan space: it is “embedded in a supra-regional constellation” and integrated into EU border and migration management – or, more precisely, reactivated in the Balkans by the EU.

People caught up in these extended border meshes experience cumulative, gradual violence. Beyond its administrative, filtering function (see Episode #1), the Balkan “buffer-zone” fulfils a biopolitical, degrading function: if people categorized as undesirables do not give up, they arrive in Europe increasingly destroyed by the crossing.

A sensitive experience of border violence

I sought to give an account of this gradual violence with other words than those of the researcher, which tend to neutralize violence in order to objectify it. The methodology I use in the field aims to facilitate the expression of narratives and knowledge derived from the experience of borders. My approach is to include people in the representation of their journey, through participatory mapping workshops [19]. When imposed by the violence of the border context (lack of intimate space, evictions, shelter deprivation), these workshops take place in a converted vehicle (the CartoMobile), designed as a space for respite, creation and work, better suited for self-expression and intellectual reflection.

In the spring of 2024, I took the CartoMobile to the outskirts of the Lipa and Borići camps. It welcomed several people, all affected by gradual institutional violence during their journey to Europe. The cartographic work I undertook with R* illustrates his journey from Tunisia to Bosnia-Herzegovina, attempting to adopt his gaze, to approach the sensitive dimension of his experience. The resulting narrative map bears the title of a quotation from R*:

Ten years of travel, and how many borders before I have the right to become someone? [20] »

R*’s individual journey reflects macro realities. Like J* and X*, this is not his first time in Europe: in 2013, he left Tunisia following the Arab Springs, to reach Italy by sea, then France and Germany. Five years passed before his asylum application was rejected and he was deported back to Tunisia with a five-year ban.

R* set off again in 2019, this time via Turkey. This was the beginning of a series of deportations across seven countries in south-eastern Europe. Over the course of this five-year journey, until our meeting in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the map shows how the border gradually thickens and the journey fragments, seeking new routes through EU member states (Greece, Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia), or non-member states that apply the border control measures promoted by the former (Northern Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina). This stage of the journey reveals the “cascading” border that can be experienced when approaching the EU, when one is engaged on roads made illegal.

R*’s testimony is also among those that question the role of Frontex, the agency being mentioned as responsible for illegal and violent refoulements at two stages of the journey (at the Macedo-Greek and Croatian-Bosnian borders) [21].

From R*’s perspective, the border experience can be understood on several levels. In addition to geopolitical and administrative barriers, there are physical, geographical and individual borders: on the one hand the Mediterranean Sea, the Balkan mountains and border rivers, such as the one he accidentally fell into in 2023; on the other hand his own body, whose capacities have deteriorated since that accident and an hospitalization for several months. This is partly how R* explained his difficulties in undertaking the game to Croatia (two attempts in one year).

The fact that he considers himself “stuck” in Bosnia-Herzegovina is also the effect of the tightened control systems at the Bosnian-Croatian border, with regard to his whole journey:

I left 10 years ago, I’ve crossed more than 10 countries. I’ve been stuck here in Bosnia for 10 months. Eventually, I was stopped here at the Croatian border. Of all the borders, Croatia is the most difficult. »

However, the words that accompanied the mapping process reflect his lucidity about the dissuasive function of indiscriminate police violence:

They hit a lot to scare us, to prevent us from crossing the border again. But they’re afraid of terrorists, not people like us. »

With R*, our graphic choices sought to convey this retrospective experience. Of a body affected by the hardships of travel, at the centre of the map. Of a border that imprisons, hence the circular arrangement of the countries crossed. Of a journey fragmented by multiple expulsions, rendered by the dislocation of spatial landmarks. Of a sticky, omnipresent and insidious illegality, in the image of the snatches of experience that wind their way through. Of long, cyclical time, of the game eternal starting again. And, at last, of an uncertain and misunderstood condition, as reflected in his question: “How many borders [do I have to cross] before I have the right to become someone?”.

On the scale of journeys lasting several years, border violence permeates memories as much as future prospects. B* deplores the fact that his little brother’s legs bear the scars of the long journey from Syria through the Balkans. H* describes how his health has plummeted since his confinement in Serbia, showing me the anti-anxiety medication given to him in the Lipa camp:

I used to be fit, very sporty, and now: cigarettes, psychologist, medication. »

As for E*, he talks at length about his condition as a black man in the Balkans, since his arrival on an island on the Greek-Turkish border.

The physical and psychological impacts of Balkan journeys continue to be observed across time and distance, for example in those who later reach the French-Italian border [22]. In the map below, made at the Terrasses Solidaires refuge in Briançon in 2023, Marouane has recomposed his Balkan experience by associating an emotion or key word with each country he crossed: agony [agonie, in French] for Morocco, racism [racisme] in Turkey, fear [peur] in Serbia and death [mort] in Hungary. More generally, when exiled people escape from the Balkans, their retrospective account takes the shape of of a veritable “journey of death” [23].

While these stories of border violence are singular, they are recurrent enough to be significant and instructive. The huge amount of the testimonies reveals the experience of a “mobile” border, a “borderity” that is exercised along the way, with little discernment [24]. Several authors have shown that violence is an integral and structural part of the border, either as a means of asserting the State [25] , or as a means of depriving people of certain resources [26].

From the accounts of R* and the other people I met at the Bosnian-Croatian border, I understand that this deprivation targets personal achievements and fairly simple life projects, in front of which the warlike geostrategy deployed by the EU seems disproportionate.

Eventually, testimonies from the Balkans lead to the chilling realization that physical and psychological violence has become part of the border control strategies of several European states, supported in this by the EU. The border filter no longer operates so much on the level of rights linked to status (since these rights are massively violated), but on each individual’s ability to survive this institutionalized violence.

Those who emerge unscathed are the survivors of the European border.

To be continued in the third part of this series: How did the Croatian police reach such a level of violence and illegality? What is the responsibility of the Frontex agency, increasingly present in the Balkans?