Quelle: Balkan Insight | 12.01.2017

Migrants keep coming to Serbia but survival is getting tougher as the border with Hungary is now almost impossible to cross without paying the smugglers dear

Natalia Zaba

More than 1,500 migrants from Pakistan and Afghanistan, many of them children and teenagers, are battling Serbia’s icy winter weather in an abandoned army barracks with little hope of moving forward on their journeys.

Many have been there for weeks if not months. With no running water or electricity, they keep themselves warm using improvised fireplaces inside the barracks, which produce a lot of smoke. It makes one wonder how nights be spent inside with lungs still functioning.

Shapur from Afghanistan has spent two months in these conditions. He and his friend Kamrad are gearin up to travel to France.

Although Serbia’s Ministry of Social Affairs has asked NGO not to distribute help and so encourage people to linger, a humanitarian organization distributes meals every day in the area.

“We distribute a thousand meals a day here and we always run out of food,” Paul Linger, a volunteer for Hot Food Idomeni, says. “This is just an emergency response,” he continued.

He says they will stay as long as they feel needed, but the “how long will that take?” question goes without an answer.
While the EU struggles to solve the migrant crisis in general, solving the particular problem of people who have become stuck in Serbia is looking insoluble, too.

Migrants mainly from Afghanistan and Pakistan have been using the old barracks near the railway station in Belgrade for months.

Nobody knows what their exact number is, but Ivan Gerginov, from Serbia’s Refugees Commissariat, a state body, says around 1,500 persons are currently based in the abandoned barracks.

“We have a problem because more people are coming but almost none of them leave Serbia. We have 6,000 places in our centres, and around 1,000 are still free, but people don’t want to go to distant camps,” Gerginov told BIRN.

“We’re struggling to provide more space, families are sharing beds for instance, just to create more space so that no one is left outside, but I find it hard to convince people who stay in the barracks to leave them,” he added.

In the meantime, Shapur and some other migrants hope to reach France one day soon. Only 15 years old, he has spent two months in Serbia and has tried to cross the border with Hungary three times. Each time he was caught by the police.

His friend Abaidullah has had a similar fate. Over the two months he has spent in the Belgrade barracks, he has made it twice to the border, but neither attempt was successful. The Hungarian police pushed him back to Serbia each time.

According to him, crossing the border costs now 1,500 euros. “The smugglers are our best friends. They help,“ Abaidullah said.