Bosnian Mayor Calls for Help as Migrants Increase

Suhret Fazlic, the mayor of Bihac, is holding a meeting to set up a crisis committee in the town on Wednesday and appealing for assistance from all levels of government in the country to deal with the reported increase in migrants passing through the area.

"Here in Bihac, it is even hard to say how many of them there are, since they are coming and going through Bihac and [the nearby town of] Velika Kladusa, and no one is there to help them except a few NGOs," Fazlic said in a statement on Tuesday.

He also said that he expects state and entity-level institutions to get involved in solving the problem.

Bosnia and Herzegovina's border police said on Monday that they recorded 1,036 attempts at illegal border crossings from January to April 15 this year. 

This is an almost double the amount in 2017, when 605 attempts were recorded for the entire year.

A total of 1,191 people were also prevented from entering Bosnia at its borders with Montenegro and Serbia.

"In most of the cases they are from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kosovo, Turkey, Syria, Libya, Morocco and Iran, and the majority tried to enter Bosnia from Serbia and Montenegro," Sanela Dujkovic, a border police spokesperson, told BIRN.

Bosnian Security Minister Dragan Mektic said however that he does not think the situation presents any threat, but cooperation between countries in the region should be established.

"We, the representatives of Western Balkan countries, have not had any meetings so far regarding this situation, and the question of the rising number of migrants is not just a question for Bosnia," Mektic told a press conference on Monday. 

Hundreds of thousands of migrants passed through the so-called 'Balkan route' in 2015, trying to reach Western...