The director of the Caritas charity in Bosnia and Herzegovina is now taking Europe to the task. His global Catholic charity has received very little support in its efforts to assist migrants. He is now appealing for more help from other organizations across Europe.
In an interview with the KNA news agency last week, Tomo Knezevic said that most Caritas associations in Europe remained silent when helping migrants stuck without anyone to turn to in Bosnia. He acknowledged that while some national and individual Caritas chapters paid a bit of attention to the plight of the more than 10,000 refugees and migrants in the country, his “telephone lines are unfortunately on mute” most of the time when it comes to helping from the EU in particular.
“The EU, and especially Germany, sent a clear welcome signal to refugees five years ago, encouraging them to come here,” Knezevic told KNA. “And today? Today, people are being locked out, pushed back in part by force, and their fate is then being used as a deterrent,” he stressed in the interview.
EU Not Acting According to Christian Values
With the EU’s outer border effectively ending at the Bosnian-Croatian border, thousands of migrants have been stuck in the Balkan country for years, repeatedly attempting to cross into the EU via neighboring Croatia, which has been an EU member state since 2013. However, Croatian border guards have been accused for several years of using violence against such migrants, pushing them back across the border forcefully and in defiance of international law.
Knezevic further accused the EU of turning a blind eye to these sets of circumstances. He appealed to the Christian sensitivities of KNA’s audience, which is Germany’s Catholic news agency, in particular, saying that “the EU must not play the role of Pontius Pilate here and wash its hands clean of the refugee issue. Christians are certainly not allowed to do that.”
The charity had recently warned that a humanitarian catastrophe could ensue outside the EU’s border in Bosnia if nothing changed.
Hospitality Towards Migrants Amid Tension and Despair
In the interview, Knezevic highlighted that the vast majority of the migrants stuck in Bosnia were young Muslim men — many of whom, he said, had left their native countries primarily for economic reasons. He added that Bosnia, which also has a majority Muslim population, was generally welcoming and hospitable to these migrants and refugees, who he said hailed from countries near and far, including Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the Palestinian Territories, North Africa, and in some cases also sub-Saharan Africa.
“It was just a quarter of a century ago that there was war in our own country. Therefore, we know what it is like to have no home, while suffering hunger and fear and not knowing how to go on. That is why we give bread or firewood, even if many of us have hardly anything ourselves. It may also be helpful that almost half of our population is Muslim, like most of the migrants. But Orthodox and Catholic Christians also help, of course,” he explained.