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Christmas Day at the Borders
The main respondent is a 33 year old man from Algeria. He was travelling with a group of 19 people consisting of Moroccans, Afghanis, and Algerians. They left Bosnia in the evening on the 25th of December 2024 and spent the night in the forest. On the 26th, they were caught by the police in Croatia 15 kilometres from the Slovenian border. They were then illegally put in a detention centre for four days until on the 30th they were pushed back over the border. The respondent said that the police were dressed in black. According to him, these were not border police or FRONTEX but normal Croatian police. They were unmasked but they shone a bright light in his eyes using a powerful torch to blind him before they beat him. The main respondent also said there was an Arabic speaking person there who was most likely a translator as he was not wearing a uniform, but that he also participated in the beating.
Approximate location where the group was pushed back to Bosnia on the 30th December 2024. Exact location not confirmed.
The main respondent says that he thinks because he was the person leading the group through the forest, the police beat him the most. He thinks that they saw him from the cameras. They beat him so hard that at some point he was throwing up from the pain, and they also broke one of his limbs. The police also put his boot on the face of another member of the group, and the main respondent says that if the police had put a tiny bit more pressure he is sure this person would no longer be able to speak. After the police caught them, they asked them to lie down on the ground and then began to beat the group. They took all their belongings and threw them away – chargers, clothes, phones, money, bags. The police really screamed at them and demanded that they do everything very quickly.
He says that if you were slower than the rest of the group then they would beat you more. The group was then put in several small cars of the local police, when they were brought to a place where there were several other people who were caught trying to cross the borders. They were then transferred to a bigger blue van, and the police would not speak to the people at all. In the detention centre, they were given one small triangle of cheese, a small bit of bread, and one bottle of water twice a day. The police said they were going to take fingerprints and then release them, but in the end, they did not collect their fingerprints and kept them their for four days. The respondent thinks this is because it was the Christmas holidays so nobody could be bothered to take them. The main respondent says they were treated like dogs. One of the people they were with was beaten because he asked if he could call his family to let them know that he was still alive and in prison.
As the days passed in prison, the room began to fill up with more and more people, until there were around 60 of them. On the 30th of December, these 60 people were transported together to be pushed back over the border between Bosnia and Croatia. There was only one officer that explained to them that this was going to happen, the rest refused to speak to the people. The respondent describes how when they were driving back to the border, the police would drive very recklessly and fast on purpose so everyone in the back of the van would hit their heads against the metal of the van and hurt themselves. The police left them in the middle of the forest and beat them, then screaming at them to run and return back to Bosnia. The police also shot bullets in the air to make them run even faster back to border. As the police had taken their clothes and shoes, some people were forced to run in the snow barefoot. There were other groups around them who were being pushed back simultaneously, including groups with women and children. |n one of the other groups there was a person with a disability who was beaten, attacked by the police dogs and then thrown into a river. The respondent says with that group it seemed as though the police who were beating them wanted to kill these people.
After crossing back into Bosnia, the group then walked to Glinica and eventually returned to the Borici family camp in Bihac.
overview
19 people ,
from Morocco, Afghanistan, and Algeria,