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Bosnian and Croat border guards face migrants, Maljevac, 24 October 2018. REUTERS / Marko Djurica

The "Balkan route" has been theoretically closed since March 2016. But Bosnia and Herzegovina is now a step to try to cross into Croatia. Scuffles erupted on Tuesday (October 23rd) at the border between the two countries after the Bosnian police prevented about 250 migrants from approaching them. NGOs warn of a worsening of the situation with the arrival of the cold season. The lighting of Loïc Tregoures, professor of political science at the Catholic University of Paris and specialist in the Balkans.

RFI: Previously avoided by migrants, Bosnia has been confronted since the beginning of the year with an influx that it is struggling to manage. Why ?

Loïc Tregoures: The administrative entanglement in Bosnia means that in this country we do not agree on "who should do what" and where we should put the migrants who circulate, where we should open a new center for asylum seekers, etc. Everyone returns the ball.

In spite of all the good will that the citizens put in the help that they can bring punctually to the migrants, they are completely overwhelmed. While Bosnia is just a passing country on the new Balkan route from Greece and Albania, then through Montenegro and Bosnia. Migrants and refugees are meeting in Bihac and Velika Kladusa (near the Bosnian-Croat border, ed), because it is supposed to lead to Croatia.

That said of Bosnia what we already know: it is an administratively complicated country, in any case so poor and not used to dealing with these situations that it can not do it. We can not keep people in a state that is not able to take care of them, while winter is coming to Bosnia, and the winter is very harsh.

For you, does the European Union not provide the support it is supposed to provide in this situation?

There is financial support, but it has a limit. It's good to promise tens or hundreds of thousands of euros, to fund UNHCR, IOM, local NGOs, but that does not answer the real challenge: refugees and migrants want to go first in Croatia and then in the rest of Western Europe.

In short, the European financial aid is to say "you keep them at home", except that these people do not want to stay in Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro. The determination of these migrants is not undermined by the violence that the Croatian police regularly inflict on them, because their aim is to go anyway (Croatia was summoned by the Council of Europe on 5 October to open investigations into the violence that his police are accused of exercising against migrants, editor's note).

There are still many Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans on this road ... people who could possibly benefit from political asylum. There are also Algerians, Moroccans for whom it is much more difficult. If there were at least, as four years ago, corridors in a legal and secure way, there could be a care for these individuals in a humane way. We are not talking about hundreds of thousands of people, but from 3,000 to 4,000. It would be easy to look at who can have asylum, and who can not have it.