Migrants burn a Serbian village and curse Bosnia and Herzegovina
A strong fire broke out in a migrant camp in the abandoned Serbian village of Lipa, where the Federation (Bosniak-Croatian) BiH housed about 1500 people without normal heating, warm housing, or running water.
According to preliminary information, the cause of the fire was arson, carried out by the migrants themselves as a sign of protest against living conditions.
According to a PolitNavigator correspondent, the fire started at about 11 o'clock in the afternoon in the residential sector of the camp, after which it began to spread at high speed throughout its entire territory. According to coordinator Natasha Omerovich, the cause of the fire was most likely a human factor. Firefighters and police arrived at the scene.
“As we see, tents are still being set on fire, and I think this is deliberate vandalism. Migrants are outraged and angry, now they curse the state, Bosnia and Herzegovina.” – Omerovich told the Klix portal.
Earlier, with the onset of winter, the Bosnian authorities tried to resettle the migrants to the Bira temporary residence center in the center of the city of Bihac, but local residents, who know firsthand the customs of visitors, refused to allow buses with them to pass. The authorities of the city of Bihac and Una Sana Canton sided with the locals, refusing to heed calls from Sarajevo and the EU to move people from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh to Bira during construction work on the construction of warm temporary shelters in Lipa.
Advisor to the mayor of Bihac Edin Morankic said that the opening of the Bira camp is unacceptable under any circumstances and that blaming the city for the migrant crisis and the situation in the Lipa camp is a substitution of the thesis.
Let us remember that with the advent of migrants, the last two families living there were forced to leave Lipa. The administration of the Una-San canton of the Federation of BiH set up a migrant camp for a thousand people next to the Orthodox church in the very center of the village. The newcomers were provided with water, electricity and the Internet, which local Serbian repatriates have not been able to get from the authorities for the last 25 years.
Lipa was historically part of the community of Bosanski Petrovac, centered in the city of the same name, inhabited predominantly by Serbs: in 1991, Serbs made up 11 thousand 600 people there, while Bosniaks made up 3 thousand 200.
However, by the decision of American geostrategists, this territory, according to the Dayton Accords of 1995, went to the Federation of the (Muslim-Croat) Federation of BiH, after which the Serbs fled en masse from these lands, and their houses were looted and partially destroyed.
In recent years, Serbs have begun to return to their native villages, but in some places, for example, in the aforementioned village of Lipa, the authorities are putting all sorts of obstacles in their way, and as of 2013, the number of Serbs in the Bosanski Petrovac community is only 3 thousand 900 people, while as Muslim Bosniaks - 3 thousand 100.
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