Bosnia struggles with arrivals

‘Hungarians not stone-hearted’

SARAJEVO/BIHAC, May 15, (Agencies): Bosnia is struggling to cope with the arrival of thousands of migrants and refugees, many of whom are sleeping in parks in the capital and other towns as they seek passage into western Europe.

The country’s asylum centre has 200 beds and 80 to 150 people have arrived each day this month, Security Minister Dragan Mektic said on Monday.

About 4,000 people from Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Algeria and Afghanistan have entered Bosnia this year compared with 755 in 2017 and up to 1,500 are stuck there. Many have faced perilous journeys.

“I was sent back from Croatia six times,” said Omar from Iraq, who arrived in Bosnia with his younger brother after spending two years in Greece. Omar declined to give his last name.

“I must get to Germany because all my family is there,” said the 19-yearold, echoing many others who spoke in the empty old building in Bihac near the Croatian border where he stayed.

More than a million migrants came to Europe in 2015. The so-called Balkan route into western Europe via Turkey, Greece, Macedonia and Serbia was shut in 2016 when Turkey agreed to stop the flow in return for EU aid and a promise of visa-free travel for its own citizens.

But since autumn, following stricter border controls between Serbia, Hungary and Croatia, smugglers have created a new route from Greece via Albania, Montenegro and Bosnia to Croatia and western Europe.

Migrants stranded in Serbia since 2016 are also increasingly crossing to Bosnia and many Iranians are also taking advantage of a visa-free regime introduced last year between

bridge linking southern Russia and the Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

The 19-kms (11.8-mile) bridge that cost $3.6 billion is Putin’s project to show that Crimea has joined Russia for good. Transport links to Crimea deteriorated after trains crossing the Ukrainian mainland were

Merkel

Ursula

Serbia and Iran.

While the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) expects arrivals to continue on average of 350-400 a week, Adnan Tatarevic from Pomozi.ba, a Sarajevo-based NGO that has helped migrants since January, says the numbers are higher.

“We expect about 50,000 arrivals by the end of the year,” Tatarevic told Reuters. International groups helping migrants have urged the government to accommodate people sleeping rough.

“The longer we wait to put accommodation and everything with it in place, the risk is we are creating ... a mini-humanitarian crisis,” said Peter Van Der Auweraert, IOM’s western Balkans coordinator. “It has to be done not in two months time but ... next week.”

In related news, Bosnia must do more to help migrants, a European human rights official said Tuesday as the war-scarred country struggles to cope with a growing influx of people trying to reach Western Europe through the Balkans.

WARSAW, Also: Poland:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Monday that his country’s strong opposition to allowing migrants into Europe doesn’t mean that Hungarians have hearts of stone.

On a visit to Warsaw, Orban and his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki, defended their refusal to accept refugees, a stance that has put them in conflict with the European Union.

Both leaders said their nations are aiding people in Africa and the Middle East, in or closer to their native lands, insisting this was a better way to address migration.

cancelled and both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries set up checkpoints crossing into Crimea.

Putin traveled Tuesday to southern Russia to inspect the construction site and jumped into an orange Kamaz truck along with two engineers to drive over the bridge, leading several dozen trucks.

Putin annexed Crimea in March 2014 following a hastily called local vote. The European Union and the US hit Russia with sanctions for the move. (AP)

‘Make sanctions observation crime’:

Russian lawmakers unanimously approved in its first reading on Tuesday a bill that makes it a criminal offence to observe sanctions imposed by the United States or other countries, as part of counter-sanctions measures against Washington.

The United States last month imposed sanctions on some of Russia’s biggest