

Migrants in front of the Bira temporary reception centre in Bosnia, Photo: BIRN

A push by Bosnia and Herzegovina to deport all “economic migrants” to their countries of origin is not going to plan after disputes arose rapidly with Pakistan.

On Monday, a Bosnian government minister and the Pakistan embassy accused each other of not cooperating in the process of identifying Pakistani citizens currently in Bosnia whom the Sarajevo authorities claim are illegal migrants. The Bosnian security ministry says over 3,000 people should be deported to Pakistan once a deal is reached.

But Fahrudin Radoncic, the Minister of Security, last week accused the Pakistani embassy of refusing to co-operate on identifying migrants who are in Bosnia.

The embassy responded by saying that Ambassador Muhammad Khalid Rao had, back on January 30, “called Radoncic to his office to discuss the issue of illegal migrants”.

The ministry on Monday then responded by insisting that the ambassador has not asked for a meeting “to discuss the 3,000 illegal migrants from his country who hide their identities from Bosnian security structures but to ask Radoncic to put pressure on the Canton of Sarajevo Prosecutor’s Office to expedite sending the dead body of a Pakistani person from Bosnia to Pakistan”.

The ministerial statement went on to accuse the Pakistan ambassador of “irresponsible behaviour” that it said “further raises the issue of public confidence in his work and his stay in Bosnia”.



According to Radoncic, when Bosnia asked the Pakistani authorities to check the fingerprints of illegal migrants in the Bosnia, the ambassador had not been helpful.

“The ambassador refused to reveal their identity based on those data and photographs. And, I will say that based on the fingerprints we gathered, we uncovered two terrorists among the migrants. Their fingerprints were found on weapons and weapons cases in a third country. Our security service did a fantastic job,” Radoncic said on Friday.

As is often the case in Bosnia, the war of words with Pakistan has further exposed ethnic and religious divides within Bosnia itself.

Far from supporting the minister, when the Bosniak member of the Bosnian Presidency, Sefik Dzaferovic, and the Foreign Minister, Bisera Turkovic, met with the ambassador, they condemned the minister for suggesting that the ambassador could be declared persona non grata unless he cooperated more closely with the Bosnian authorities.

Slobodan Ujic, director of Bosnia’s Service for Foreigner’s Affairs, SFA, told BIRN earlier that establishing the identity of migrants had been a problem for years, because the embassies of countries where migrants come from do not want to cooperate.

Radoncic earlier said that he would propose a legal solution, which meant that those migrants “who do not want to reveal their identities will not be allowed to go to accommodation centres, and they will be kept in custody until the police authorities learn their identity”.