THE END OF THE ROAD

For a countless time we wanted to start this post with the sentence “This week our team found / met / witnessed…” but it is not the case this time round. Today we will not be talking about a specific trend or situation from the field. Today we would like to draw your attention to refugees who have died on the road and the situation that arises after such an incident.

Across the refugees’ routes, from Pakistan and Afghanistan up to Serbia and further on, in all of the countries that refugees go through there are death cases. Sometimes these are violent deaths, other times refugees succumb to hunger in the middle of a mountainous region, sometimes they die due to complications of an injury on the road which could have been prevented if the person had had access to medical aid.

When it comes to Serbia and the region, most of these deaths happen in the high mountain regions of the Bulgarian - Serbian border or in the Drina river, at the border between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Rumors about the dead in the mountains between Bulgaria and Serbia are horrifying. A young man has told us once that he had seen a dead body of a man, probably from Afghanistan, when he was crossing the mountain from Bulgaria and Serbia. A few days later, when he was walking the same path after being pushed back by the Serbian police, he came across the same body but it was beheaded. The body, probably mutilated by the forest beasts, was left to decay in the mountain, and will probably stay there until it turns to bones and then eventually to nothing but dust.

Refugees who are too ill to continue their journey through the mountains end up dying there. Even though their fellow group members come to their aid, some get behind from the group, get lost and in the end die alone sitting on a rock or lying in grass in a vain attempt to gather up strength to try one last time to find a way to a village and save themselves.

It remains unknown how many human bones are scattered in the mountains. The refugees say: too much.

We have written several times in the past about the Drina river and the deadly obstacle it is on the refugees’ journey. According to unofficial data, the drownings in the river happen on a daily basis. Refugees roam the river bank looking for the bodily remains of their family members and friends.

Our colleagues and cultural mediators, as well as refugees, explained to us why these extensive searches happen, besides the never dying hope that the missing person might still be alive. As stated by a man we spoke to in the field: “If we call his family back home and tell them he has died, their father and mother will ask - Where is the body? Show him dead to us! And I, as someone who has traveled with him, am responsible to give them answers, to find the body and try to send it back to Afghanistan or bury it here so they would find their peace. It’s a huge and grave responsibility, but it is what it is. If you are a cousin or a friend, you are responsible to provide answers for the person you started off on the journey with.”

The cemetery with the most graves of people who had drowned in Drina is located in the city of Loznica. It’s the public cemetery in the city in which we identified 9 graves in August, and in November there were 13 in total. Out of these 13 graves only one is marked with a personal name and surname, while the rest are marked with NN. On the other hand, the Bosnian activists had identified 60 graves of people drowned in the river in the area of Bijeljina, Bratunac and Zvornik.

And while people continue to die on a daily basis and new graves spring up on the river banks and on the massive and steep mountains, the story about these people and their lives seems to fall on the deaf ears of those who are in the position to make decisions within the EU. There are ever more police deployed to EU’s borders, the fences are built higher and more dangerous, the policemen push refugees back to fast and deadly rivers, and all this in order, as stated in one of Frontex’s public posts: protect peaceful sleep of EU citizens (paraphrased). And while the EU citizens sleep peacefully, some other people pass away long before their time just because they were perceived as a threat to this peaceful dream of the EU, fleeing their war torn countries to countries who were presented to them as stable and developed countries where they can finally find peace. This is where the road ends.