Hundreds of migrants were left in limbo for hours Friday after Bosnian police dismantled a makeshift camp in Sarajevo but police in the south refused to let them reach a centre offering them accommodation. The standoff came after police carried out a two-hour operation to clear 250 people from a migrant camp in a tourist area in Sarajevo, which took place without incident.
Since the beginning of the year, a growing number of migrants have carved a Balkan route through Bosnia to reach the European Union raising fears of a humanitarian and security crisis in the impoverished country.
With the evacuation completed by 8:00 am (0600 GMT), the migrants were put on buses to be transferred to an accommodation centre in the country's south. But police prevented the buses from entering the district, without giving a reason. The buses waited for nearly five hours, held up in the Mount Ivan area some 40 kilometres (25 miles) outside Sarajevo, before being allowed to continue their journey. The permission was finally given after Security Minister Dragan Mektic labelled the blockade "illegal" and called for the arrest of the district police commander.
Some of the migrants, mostly young men but also some families, could be seen leaving the buses while at least two women needed medical assistance as they fainted on a very hot day, an AFP reporter said. Bosnia has a complex system of governance which has at least three separate levels of police which operate independently of each other with no clear chain of command.