Croatian border police are burning clothes, mobile phones and passports of asylum seekers who manage to reach the country from Bosnia, according to the humanitarian organization No Name Kitchen (NKK). An NNK report, to which you have had access The Guardian, With photographs of burned belongings, along with testimonies of sexual assaults and beatings by the police, it collects the latest alleged evidence of brutality against people trying to cross the borders of the European Union.
NNK is an independent movement with a presence in border areas of the Balkans and the Mediterranean, where it provides humanitarian aid to people suffering violent returns and other forms of abuse.
Every day, thousands of people from South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa and, increasingly, China, try to cross the Balkans with the aim of entering the EU. Facilities to accommodate them are scarce, and these people are forced to spend most of the arduous journey in makeshift camps or train stations. Many of them are detained and searched by the Croatian border police. There are accounts of some being robbed and violently forced to turn back and return to Bosnia, where thousands of asylum seekers can be left out in the open in often sub-zero temperatures.
These pushbacks constitute a clear violation of international law, which establishes that asylum seekers must be able to submit their application once they are within a country’s borders. NNK has detailed the location of eight large “burn piles” in which Croatian police officers allegedly incinerated people’s personal belongings and the documents they need to apply for asylum once they arrive in the EU.
According to activists, some burned mobile phones could contain evidence of abuses committed by the Croatian police, as asylum seekers managed to take photographs and videos of these actions.
NNK was aware of these burning piles, as some people expelled from Croatia whom they had helped had described them, but until now had not been able to verify these accounts. Activists traveled to the Bosnia-Croatian border in late 2023 and early 2024 to gather evidence of the burned piles mentioned in testimonies.
The organization identified locations in areas known for returns and was able to document the destruction of identification documents, bags of belongings, hundreds of phones, shoes, glasses, official documents, portable batteries, money and other everyday objects. The images collected coincide with the stories of the expelled people.
He also collected testimonies denouncing violence by the border police. In December 2023, a 23-year-old pregnant Moroccan woman said she had been sexually assaulted by Croatian officers before guards burned her belongings, along with those of other members of her group. The woman, who was traveling with her husband, another woman and three children, said a border guard subjected her to an invasive strip search, which included the inside of her genitals, and threatened to rape her. The search “was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” the woman said: “I would have preferred him to hit me than to search me like that.”
According to the woman’s story, after the guards let the group go, which turned around in the direction of Bosnia, the agents burned the objects that had been confiscated from them.
According to another testimony, from November 2023, a group of four Moroccan men were allegedly beaten by police officers who then burned their belongings.
According to this testimony, the police forced the men to walk barefoot in the hot ashes, threatening them with batons. NNK activists claim that the Moroccan man they spoke to suffered burns on the soles of his feet.
Croatia denies abuses
Despite testimonies from aid workers and journalists, Croatia consistently denies expelling asylum seekers to Bosnia or using violence against them. Recently, NNK presented its evidence to the UN special rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards.
A spokesperson for the Croatian Ministry of the Interior has stated that the government has a “zero tolerance policy towards any possible illegal activity committed by its personnel” and that it has an independent mechanism to monitor the conduct of the police. Regarding the testimonies of the pregnant woman and the group of four Moroccan men, the spokesperson pointed out that “it is totally inconceivable that such an incident would occur without immediately reporting it to the police.”
The spokesperson notes that human traffickers are often responsible for violence and theft at the border, and that police have documented “many cases of fabricated complaints.”
“Regarding claims that Croatian police are burning items they have confiscated from migrants, we would like to point out that, to avoid being returned to Croatia as applicants for international protection, migrants sometimes destroy documents and abandon personal belongings when They try to illegally cross the border,” says the spokesperson.
In 2019, then-Croatian president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović appeared to acknowledge these returns in an interview with Swiss television network SFR. Although he had denied it for months, on that trip to Switzerland he acknowledged that the police had used force, but denied that the returns were illegal.
In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Croatian police were responsible for the death of a six-year-old Afghan girl, Madina Hussinywho together with her family was forced to return to Serbia across the train tracks. She died hit by a train.
Translation by Emma Reverter
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