Sacrificed lives: on Romanian women looking after elderly people in Italy

Imagine what it’s like living the life of someone old and ill before you are old and ill yourself. Canceling your own identity and conforming to the rhythms of their lives. Waking up in the morning when they wake up, washing them, making them breakfast, keeping them company 24 hours a day.

Cooking, playing cards if asked, cleaning around the house, sometimes being criticised by them and their family, watching the TV shows they want to watch, getting them ready for bed, going to bed at the same hour as them, waking up at night if they need you or shout out because of hallucinations – some patients have dementia or Alzheimer. Day after day, year after year, for 15, 16, 20 years of your life. Years you have not lived, because there was no more room for your own life, for walks, love, music, parties, family or friends.

You only have two hours off, but not every day and only if you’re lucky enough for the Italian family that employs you to at least observe this one right you have.

You live every day in the house of strangers, some of whom treat you kindly, while others don’t. Some count the biscuits you eat and ask you why you use so much of the coffee, others keep you in the cold in winter, asking you to do the laundry by hand and treating you like a servant for the whole family, though that was not your initial agreement.

You might be doing undeclared or semi-declared work in Italy, in other words either without a contract, or with one that only declares five or six hours a day, though you work 24/7. Of course, 24/7 work is illegal in Italy, but the families are unwilling or can’t afford to pay more tax or hire two badanti,* as necessary.

You accept it all, because you are forced by the debt and poverty back in Romania. You need this job, and your family in the country needs the money you earn.

Your pension will be small, so you can expect an old age with no safety net. You can only hope your sacrifice will not be forgotten by the children you helped.

You are far from your family. Your children have grown up without you and you feel guilty for it. Sometimes, relatives in the country treat you like an ATM. You are foreign to the life you left behind. You never feel “at home” with the elderly people you look after, no matter how kind your employer family is.

You grow attached to the elderly, because you spend two, five or ten years with them. You are the only person who is by their side every day, who knows their sufferings and their habits. You take care of them as they sink deeper into their illness, you are next to them when they start to agonise. You think of the life you never had a chance to live, because you’ve lived the life and death of these old people.

If you are lucky, the Italian family will let you stay with them for a few more days or a week, until you find another job, taking care of another elderly person. If you are not lucky and have no labour contract either, the family can throw you out from one day to the next. There is no guarantee in this line of work.

You take your suitcase and move into the house of another old person, to learn their habits and get acquainted with their suffering.

You read press articles that blame you for leaving your children home alone, with offensive comments. You don’t know who these people are, those who judge your life and decisions without knowing them.

You don’t know for how long you will continue to work in Italy, because your family always needs your help. Sometimes you return home years later, after falling ill yourself, away from your children, doing the hardest job in the world.

“If I had stayed in my country, I’d be long dead”

This spring I spent a few weeks in the southern Italian region of Puglia, where I met several Romanian women working as badanti. I spoke with them in the parks in the small towns of Lecce province where they go during the two hours off which they should have each day, but which they don’t always get.

City of Cursi, Province of Lecce, Italy, May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

The reasons they left the country have been known for years and have to do with day-to-day life in Romania: unemployment, poverty, marginalisation of the vulnerable. Many Romanian women sacrificed themselves for their families when their husbands lost their jobs following the closure of factories or mines. Some are single mothers who have had to leave their children to afford raising them. Others were left without a workplace when textile workshops or various factories in Romania closed down.

In the weeks spent in Puglia, I discovered a phenomenon that should have started to worry us years ago, when a whole wave of Romanian women first left to look after elderly people in Italy: many of them fled the violence of their husbands. In the absence of programmes for survivors of domestic violence and shelters for women, migration was their solution for saving their lives.

After I published one of my articles on badante on our Facebook page, Teleleu, it gathered hundreds of comments, most of them from Romanian women looking after elderly people in Italy. Many of them said they ran away from the country because of domestic violence, but I was particularly impressed by this comment*:

“If it wasn’t for Italy, there’d be another little place in the world for me to hide from an abuser who, instead of rebuilding his life, is still looking for me to kill me for not putting up with his maltrato. I chose to live for my four children, even running away and doing honest work in this tough world, putting my life back together with someone else, because I wanted my children to be proud and happy. And today I am pleased with what I decided. If I had stayed in my country, I’d be long dead. This way I disfruto and am proud of my children, because they still have me and always had me to support them when they needed me.”

This is not the only woman who wrote to me saying she saved her life when she went to work in Italy. A. shared with me a similar story: “I was 25 when I was left to raise my child alone, after my mother told me she’d help me with her. So I left my daughter in Romania with her (biggest mistake of my life). The child’s father took drugs, beat me, was very jealous, once he wanted to drive his car off a bridge with me. He wanted to kill me. I was pregnant then, I miscarried because of the stress – and he said it wasn’t his baby. I called the police and left to work as a badante through an agency. I had no home, I had no one. I had no other choice.”

Leverano, Province of Lecce, Italy, May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

The Romanian state’s failure to build shelters, improve legislation and implement programmes supporting survivors of domestic violence has led to migration over the last few decades.

Migration is a consequence of the social problems faced by Romania, and when politicians speak of this phenomenon, they should also speak of solutions for survivors of domestic violence. 26.809 cases of domestic violence were reported in 2020, and 72 people were killed as a consequence, most of them women and children.

There is a direct link between migration and domestic violence, underage motherhood, racism, corruption, unemployment, the malfunctioning of the health and education system, as I have written before.

The number of Romanians living abroad is enormous: in Italy alone there are now 156.855 Romanian badante. The real number could be double, because DOMINA, an association for families, estimates that 57% of them do undeclared work. On the 1^st of January 2021, there were 1.076.412 Romanians living in Italy.

She lost years of her life in exchange for the over 100.000 euro she earned in Italy

Eugenia was 43 in 2011, when she ran away from home because of domestic violence; she, too, saved herself by going to work in Italy. She used to live in Tulcea, in her parents’ old house, with her husband and 17-year-old daughter.

She borrowed 100 euro from a friend, packed some summer clothes and took the bus to Lecce, in southern Italy, where she had heard there was work to be found. She only had a pack of biscuits and some bagels – her food for the two-and-a-half-day ride. You can read her whole story here.

Eugenia, 54, cares for a 94-year-old woman from Leverano, Lecce province. The photo was taken in front of the house, on the street where he lives. Italy, May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

Ileana [a pseudonym] left Romania at 41 because of domestic violence: she was afraid she’d lose her life. Still, she continued sending money to her husband, because they have two children together and they built houses for them on the land they own.

Ileana often only kept 10 euro for herself, in case she fell ill and needed medicine. She did undeclared work, with no contract, because when you need money and don’t want to go back home to your violent husband, you’ll accept anything.

She was humiliated, offended and kept in the cold by the Italian families she worked for. She was treated as a servant, lost years of her life in exchange for the over 100.000 euro she sent to her family in Romania during her 16 years of work in Italy.

Now Ileana has nothing. Her husband won’t let her return to the house he has renovated with the money she earned in Italy. She has no legal recourse against him, because the land under their house and those they built for their children belongs to him, as inheritance from his parents. She wouldn’t dare take him to court anyway, because she is afraid of her violent husband.

She has no savings, because she has sent home almost all her earnings, and in a few years she will reach retirement age. This is just a manner of speaking, since Ileana will have no pension, considering she’s done almost all her work without a contract. So I reformulate: in a few years, when Ileana becomes unable to keep up with this hard work, she will have no home and no income to rely on.

She is not the only citizen in this situation, and the Romanian state is not ready for their return. Dozens of thousands of Romanian women, now badante in Italy, will return to the country in their old age. Some will come back to their violent husbands, because they have nowhere else to go. Others won’t be able to support themselves, because their work in Italy was undeclared.

How will we support these women? What is the Romanian state’s strategy for the social problems they will face – the lack of income in old age, violence from their partners, or situations like Ileana’s, in which families don’t let them come back after they sent them all the money they earned in Italy?

Their life is a series of sacrifices

Romanian women are used to sacrificing themselves, because local society has this expectation of them. And a badante’s destiny involves sacrifice, because living 15, 16, 20 years of the lives of elderly ill people whom you look after day after day until their death is no life.

Their sacrifice goes so far that some Romanian women even find extra work cleaning during the two hours off they should have every day, like Ionela told us. “Working as a badante is like being on house arrest,” a Romanian woman commented on our Facebook page.

Mioara (left) and Neta (right), both from Craiova, work as maids in the town of Cursi, province of Lecce. Italy, May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

Priest Ioan Grancea of the Eastern Orthodox church “Sfântul Cuvios Irodion de la Lainici” in Lecce, Italy, says Romanian women don’t consider underclared work and unpaid holiday overtime a breach of their rights, because they come to Italy with the thought that they must sacrifice themselves for their families.

Many of them, apart from the difficulties they face in Italy, are subject to pressure from back home: debt they need to pay off, domestic violence, relationship problems, children who don’t understand their mothers’ sacrifices.

One of the stories that stayed with priest Ioan Grancea was the case of a Romanian badante diagnosed with fast-growing cancer while she was looking after an elderly man. The priest and a few members of the Romanian community helped her file a request for financial aid from the Italian state.

The woman didn’t wait for the documents to be processed; she found work with another family, who didn’t know she was ill. She took time off once a month to go to chemotherapy. Though the priest and the Romanian community around the church tried to convince her to change her mind, she wouldn’t hear of it – she told them she had to help her son, who was having trouble back in the country.

“To ask for your rights, first you need to afford it”

When people discuss the rights of Romanian badante and the abuse they suffer, some voices continue to blame the victims: Why do they accept to work in those conditions? Why don’t they ask for their rights?

Their vulnerability begins in Romania, the first country where their rights haven’t been observed. Romanians put up with abuse abroad because no one in their own country has taught them they have rights.

Many of the women were already badly paid and exploited in Romania. Eugenia worked at a bread factory in Tulcea, where she broke a leg going down stairs holding a crate with products. Though she limps to this day because of that work accident, the factory never paid her any damages.

Marcela grew up in a community in Curtea de Argeș where many women were beaten by their husbands, as she was. There are 30 families on Marcela’s street, and 10 women there have left to work abroad. For many Romanian women, Italy was a way out, because the Romanian state never held out a helping hand in the form of proximity bracelets for aggressors or sufficient beds in shelters.

Because they have always been on their own, these women don’t know how to ask for support from institutions when they are sexually abused. They are afraid, because in Romania domestic violence has crushed their courage.

Poverty makes you vulnerable, as one of the women who left a comment on our Facebook page put it best: “Is there any stronger force that can keep you there [in poor labour conditions] than debt and the wish to give your children a better life?”

“When you have children to raise, you work and that’s that. To ask for your rights, first you need to afford it,” another Romanian woman wrote to us.

“No one’s keeping you there by force, except for the need,” someone else said.

And a Romanian woman quoted “a saying” among badante: “Their shit [the Italian patients’] is our bread.”

The stories I learned in these last weeks are heartbreaking: single mothers, abused women, a widow who lost her job when the tailoring workshop that hired her closed, a young woman who remembers she was 14 when her mother went to Italy for work and she felt abandoned.

You can’t speak of migration without speaking of all these social problems generating it. You can’t cut out a slice of Romanian reality and ignore the whole context around it.

In the last few years, Italy has seen an influx of women from the Republic of Moldova, who come from even greater, more traumatising poverty than that in Romania – if, that is, poverty and its trauma bear any ranking.

Romanian badante blame the Moldovans for “ruining the market” because they accept undeclared work in poor conditions and for less money.

Others have complained that Romanian women don’t support each other, that they steal each other’s jobs, gossip and envy each other, ask their fellow badanti for money in exchange for finding them jobs. In the community in Lecce, a few badanti wanted to rent a one-room apartment together, to have it available for emergency situations – if one of them was thrown out by the family she works for, or is exploited by her employer, she would have this safe space to spend a week or two in, until she found a solution. They would have paid 10 or 15 euro a month each (rent is low in southern Italy), but the plan eventually fell through because of arguments between them.

Lecce, Italy, May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

I was not surprised by the story, because solidarity is a value you learn when you have the privilege of a financially comfortable life. Poverty is ugly and humiliating, it mutilates many people, and its trauma remains and changes behaviours.

Victims blame each other, but the responsibility shouldn’t rest on their shoulders. The responsible parties are the Romanian and Italian state, but so far they have been accomplices to the abuse suffered by badante.

“The Italian state is an accomplice to this situation”

Silvia Dumitrache, the founder of Associazione Donne Romene in Italia, an association defending the rights of Romanian workers, says both the Romanian and the Italian state take advantage of the badante’s sacrifices: the Romanian economy grows with the money they send home, while Italy saves on expenses.

According to the DOMINA report, the overall cost of elderly care work paid by families amounts to 11,6 billion euro – which the Italian state saves, by no longer providing such care through its public assistance service.

Moreover, the Italian state gains money from the taxes paid by the families who sign employment contracts with their badante. Silvia Dumitrache says institutions turn a blind eye to many badante  working 24/7 and to breaches of their rights: “The Italian state is an accomplice to the situation.”

Mirela Videa, employment and social affairs attaché at the Romanian Embassy in Italy, believes the Italian state should implement two solutions: providing tax rebates to families caring for elderly members and creating an institution to manage “the confluence between demand and offer”, allocating jobs and eliminating black market brokers, who exploit workers.

Silvia Dumitrache says Romania has the responsibility of informing Romanian workers, who should know their rights when they go work abroad.

Ionela and Bogdan Potcovariu work as nurses in Italy. In 2011, they bought a house in installments in Neviano. May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

While I was doing interviews with Romanian badanti, I received two recurrent answers to the question “Why did you come work in Italy?” Many women told me they had debts from buying house appliances or from loans they took out when a family member died unexpectedly and they couldn’t afford the funeral.

Migration is only a slice of Romanian reality, in which women leave their children to be able to pay the installments for their washing machine.

***

Close to Easter, I published a material describing the atmosphere among Romanians spending the holiday in Lecce province. It included a few paragraphs about badanti who can’t make it to the Romanian store for their groceries nor to the Easter Vigil in the Romanian church, because they can’t leave their elderly people alone.

The material gathered many comments on Facebook – some from badanti, some from people who understand their suffering and sacrifice. Others were offensive and stunned me with their meanness and lack of empathy.

I will end with a few of these latter comments, so we can read them and feel ashamed. Because it is not just the institutions, but also us, common Romanians, who have a responsibility to see these women, to understand their suffering and to fight for their rights – rights that should be demanded not only by them, the victims, but also by us, who have the privilege of knowing solidarity.

They’re actually the Italians’ women..it’s just their citizenship that’s Romanian..😁 I know their likes 🤣

What a Bitter life better a svervant in my own country than for foreigners

Stay wherever you can make a good living but, you expats stop deciding the fate of those of us who stayed home.

Well stay there then, but stop moaning about how you miss your country ,your family.

Italian pensioners can afford “badante” while Romanian pensioners live on 5 lei a day .

We know their kind,no poso di parlare romena..🤣 Cheap women for the italians..🤣

In that case, if you’re doing so well there, they should withdraw your right to vote in the presidential and parliament elections, you’re the reason we were stuck with Basescu and Iohannis who ruined our country

You’re all sex slaves for the Italians 

Anyway, you’d better give up Romanian citizenship, so we know who’s on our side and who isn’t .

well thats because back in the country you were an illiterate bum, there at least you wash some ass and can afford panetone from lidl. fucking illiterate scum, the moment you step outside the border you start badmouthing this country like it’s the country’s fault that you didn’t finish 8 years of school and lived your whole life in rubber boots, fuck your life in italy

Yes, they look after old people, while our own old people are left to die in misury.

no one’s asking you to come back slaaves

i … on you you’re their slaves and when you come to the country you act all big and forget romanian

Stay there, since you sold yourself for a ,,paneton,,

*I have decided to use the term badante in this text; it became commonplace in Romania in the early 2000s, when căpșunari (strawberry pickers) and badante (live-in carers) were the most important waves of migrations in our country yet. I find its social and cultural semantics crucial for the story of the Romanian diaspora. In Italy, the word badante is still used informally, though in public communication terms like “domestic worker” or “family assistant” are preferred.

Silent Graves

Hossain Soki Walladi used to say he was born twice. The first time in Chad, a country whose regime killed his father and brother, and threw him in jail. The second time in Sweden, where he tried to build a new life. Soki was fifteen when military forces invaded his village and took him to the police station. They demanded he reveal to them the whereabouts of members of his immediate family, who were supporters of the local resistance movement. “Since I couldn’t answer their questions, they brutalised me. They beat me, put out cigarettes on my body and cut me with jagged cans and bottles,” Soki testified. After eight months of torture, he was released, only to learn that his elder brother and father had been liquidated. His mother soon passed away, and once he had provided for her funeral he fled to Libya, from where he set out for Europe by boat in 2001. When Soki arrived in Boden in northern Sweden and applied for asylum, he was seventeen. But the Swedish migration system treated him as an adult.

“This practice used to be common in our country. The Swedish authorities simply ignored what it said on Soki’s birth certificate, the only document he possessed. Also, they could not find anyone who knew the language of his tribe, so they presented him a document stating that he spoke Swahili and Arabic. Since he was illiterate and terrified, he signed it without question. That mistake meant he was labelled unreliable, and it dogged him to the very end,” says Soki’s longtime friend Anna in an interview with the Novosti weekly. She met Soki at the Red Cross in Boden, where he and her mother both worked as volunteers.

Hossain Soki Walladi 1984 – 2020. (Photo: Privatna archive)

In the following years, he learned to write and speak Swedish with the help of a local teacher, adopted a cat, Nisa, and made a wide circle of friends, with whom he travelled the whole country. He volunteered for a time as a mobility assistant for special-needs people and with the Boden municipality. Since he was popular with the clients, his supervisor once accompanied him to the migration office to help him at least obtain a work permit. But all efforts were in vain because the competent court repeatedly rejected Soki’s asylum application. At the same time, his native Chad denied him permission to return to the country. And so things continued until January 2018, when he was detained and then deported to central Africa.

“After so many years in Sweden, that was an extremely traumatic experience for Soki and all of us who knew him,” says Anna, who stayed in touch with her longtime friend.

He called her once a month, and whenever she would ask him how he was doing in Chad, he answered tersely. They last heard from each other two years ago.

“As usual, he wanted me to tell him about my family and his other friends. We reminisced about amusing situations and ended the conversation laughing. He never once told me he was on the way back to Europe. Not once. Probably he didn’t want us to worry. That’s why I got a terrible shock a few months later, when the Swedish police called and asked if I knew anyone called Soki. A person with that name on a credit card was found dead in Croatia,” adds Anna, who went on to assist the Croatian Ministry of the Interior (MUP), through Interpol, in the process of identifying the victim.

Soki Walladi’s body was pulled from the River Korana in ​​Pavlovac, near the town of Slunj, on 28 June 2020. Although almost all the circumstances of his death remain unknown to this day, it can be assumed that he drowned after crossing into Croatia from Velika Kladuša (Bosnia-Herzegovina); presumably he aimed to return via Slovenia to the west of the European Union.

“In Boden, we still can’t believe that this happened. We often talk about him, and we miss him immensely. His small hands that made coffee and food for us, his big brown eyes, his smiles, and the affection he lavished on us,” Anna remembers her friend, whose body is buried in Skakavac, 3,000 kilometres away.

We soon found Soki’s grave at the cemetery of that village near Karlovac. Although located at the very edge of the cemetery, it can hardly be overlooked. It is covered by a mound of earth, with two tall, Islamic-style wooden grave markers protruding. The brown one has a small plaque nailed to it, with the designation 1-9-1C: here Ait and Rachid, two Moroccans whose bodies were found in the River Mrežnica in the summer of 2020, are buried beside Soki. The grave next to theirs, with the green marker and the designation 1-9-1A, is the final resting place of four more young men: Alifrom Bangladesh, Ratib from Syria, Yasser from Morocco and Eslam from Egypt. Their graves are the only ones in that part of the cemetery where there are neither flowers nor candles.

Although the crime pages of the local media and the official statistics of institutions typically treat their deaths as coincidental accidents, all seven are victims of the ruthless European migration policy that made it impossible for them to safely travel to western Europe in search of a better life, friends or relatives. This policy has criminalised those like Soki Walladi, who for various reasons, most often connected to war, were never able to obtain the necessary documents, labelling them as illegal migrants. It has also placed physical obstacles in their way – razor wire, border fences metres high, armed police patrols – and thus de facto deprived them of the right of free movement and access to international protection. In other words, it channelled them towards inaccessible border crossings, into a deadly path criss-crossed by rivers, seas, mountains, cliffs, railway tracks and minefields.

The grave of an unidentified person in Popović Brdo (Photo: Selma Banich)

Since early 2017, when the EU abruptly changed its policy towards refugees from the Near and Middle East, at least sixty-two migrants have died on the territory of Croatia: thirty-seven drowned, nine froze to death, five died in traffic accidents, two were hit by trains, two died from pulmonary oedema or lung failure, and the same number from natural causes. One person each died from falling into a cave or from a height, from an electric shock and from a land mine. In one case – a man who died this year – an autopsy has yet to be performed, so the cause of death is still unknown. In the same five-year period, a total of 140 migrants were injured, fifty-seven of them seriously and eighty-three slightly, according to the response we received from the MUP, which noted that the statistics relate to “third-country nationals who entered the Republic of Croatia illegally via the EU’s external borders and are staying in the country without permit”.

The largest number of migrants died in the Karlovac and Primorje-Gorski Kotar counties, but deaths have also been recorded in the counties of Osijek-Baranja, Vukovar-Srijem, Sisak-Moslavina, Lika-Senj, Brod-Posavina and Istria. Since their bodies are most often buried in the local cemeteries closest to the place of death, the graves are dotted through the villages around Otok, Novska, Karlovac, Duga Resa, Ozlje, Ogulin, etc. Only a few have been exhumed and returned to their country of origin, be it because some of the deceased have no family left or its members are scattered all over the world due to armed conflicts, be it because of the complex and expensive process, which, depending on the distance and the local bureaucracy, comes with a price tag of up to several thousand euros.

In the greater Karlovac area alone, where the municipal service company Zelenilo Ltd takes care of burials, thirteen migrants have been buried since January 2018. Their graves were visited by researchers involved in the project European Irregularized Migration Regime at the Periphery of the EU (ERIM). Marijana Hameršak, senior associate at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research and project manager, invited artist and activist Selma Banich to join them.

“The usual practice in Karlovac County is for the names of the victims not to be indicated on the graves, even when their identities have been established. Almost all the graves are decontextualised – meaning they give no information about where the deceased came from, when they were born or how they died – and it was terrifying to realise that these people had been hounded in various ways until their death. They did not have the right to free movement, access to the asylum system and the freedom to choose the place and circumstances in which to live their lives,” Banich says and stresses that it takes their death to fundamentally change the attitude of the regime and its institutions.

“Hospitals, pathology departments, service companies, police and embassies then start dealing with their corpses, which are buried in the same ground they were chased from prior to their deaths. This is pure hypocrisy of this country, the European regime of migration control, capitalism and colonialism,” she adds.

Their first visit to the cemetery in Skakavac was quite a shock, Selma Banich says, because they were not at all certain if something was a grave or a ditch, nor how many people were buried in each. This was one of the reasons for initiating a public commemorative gesture, which resulted in the creation of “The Passage/Prijelaz”, a memorial canvas with thirty-six portraits of people who died on their migrant journey through the Balkans. Artists, social scientists, activists and other members of the Women to Women collective and the ERIM project took part in making it.

“We wanted this type of decolonial practice – a process of public mourning – to enable the local community to realise the brutality of the oppressive migration regime and oppose it,” Banich explains.

Most of the migrants died in the rivers – Dobra (Photo: Tamara Opačić)

At the same time, the MUP emphasises that the Croatian police “undertakes all in its power to save migrants in dangerous situations. […] The activities of the police to intensify the surveillance of the Croatian borders and prevent the operations of organised criminal groups do not extend exclusively to preventing illegal migration and maintaining favourable security conditions at the state border, but to protecting the lives and safety of all persons, including those who attempt to enter Croatian territory illegally,” it said in reply Novosti. The MUP also boasted of there being “too many cases to count, where the Croatian police rescued migrants whose lives were endangered by deep snow and hypothermia, by travelling in impassable mountains without proper equipment, or by injuries sustained by falling from rocks, or who had to be pulled from a river because the rugged nature of the terrain prevented them from getting out themselves – cases that have been covered by the media”.

However, Selma Banich recalls that many deaths of people on the move are a direct result of pushbacks, i.e. forceful deportations, as was the case with Madina Hussiny, a girl who was hit and killed by a train in late 2017 just after the Croatian police had forced her and her family back towards Serbia. Testimonies gathered by activists of the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) show that a large number of forcible and illegal expulsions, an estimated fifty percent of them, are carried out by the Croatian police who force refugees to enter rivers and then walk or swim back to the border of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. According to the BVMN report for 2021, such practices are most common around the village of Šturlić near Cazin, where the River Korana forms the Croatian-Bosnian border. In testimony heard in spring of 2021, five underage Afghans confirmed that the Croatian police had expelled them at that location. After apprehending the youths on Croatian territory and taking them by van to the riverbank, they ordered them to lie on their stomachs and started beating them on the legs with sticks. They then forced them to cross the border through the river, which was too deep in that part, so they had to swim. “Some people have already drowned in that spot, and there were weak swimmers among us, but we had to jump into the water so they’d stop beating us. It was terrible,” one victim of the pushback described.

“I can say from experience that the Croatian institutions are absolutely in the service of the migration regime of the European Union and its member states, which bears all the hallmarks of modern fascism. Croatia, which is currently assigned the role of guarding the area between Schengen and the EU’s external border, carries out only part of the tasks of this complex system. The problems for people on the move neither begin nor end here. The root problem is a political one: the exploitation of entire communities and resources in their countries of origin, which is why they are literally forced to flee from poverty and wars – wars ironically financed, in part, by the budget of the EU,” Banich says.

“Even if they succeed in reaching western Europe, where many of these people have family members and friends, they are made to live in a tangle of permits: residence permits, work visas and other restrictions. Most often, they are exploited as cheap labour – modern slaves who pick fruit and vegetables for our supermarket shelves,” the artist adds.

Portrait of Ahmad Kahlil Ibrahim created as part of the artistic-activist project “The Passage”

Statistics of the Missing Migrants Project, an initiative backed by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), confirm that the murderous policies of the migration regime, compounded by the media and public’s lack of concern for the deaths of people who left their homes in search of safety, are not a characteristic of Croatia alone. Since 2014, 48,231 refugee deaths have been recorded worldwide, or at least sixteen every day. And this is a very low estimate because many bodies are never found, especially of those who drown in the Mediterranean, the mass grave of our age, in which at least 2,048 people died in 2021. European rivers, from the Marica to the Drina, Korana and Kupa, are becoming more and more deadly in recent years since the formal closure of the so-called Balkan refugee route. The IOM points out that the indifference of governments, and the resulting insufficient allocation of funds for finding and identifying bodies, is one of the key problems.

The MUP explains that this is a complex process in which several different institutions are involved, in the case of Croatia. “When a dead person is found, the police conduct an investigation, after which the body is transported to the Clinical Institute of Pathology and Forensic Medicine. A forensic examination is then conducted to determine the cause of death and the particular injuries, and the competent public prosecutor’s office is informed of the incident,” the police replied to us. The identity is determined by finding personal documents, by the people who reported the disappearance recognising the body, and by conducting dactyloscopic and DNA analyses. “In cases where data on the dead person’s citizenship is available, the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs informs the foreign diplomatic and consular mission in Croatia, which participates in the further procedure, both in terms of notifying the family and arranging for the body to be returned. If the identity cannot be determined by the procedures mentioned, the body is kept at the forensic facility until identification is achieved,” the MUP stated. It added that, according to the data available to the border police, the identity of fourteen people who died on Croatian territory has yet to be established.

This figure would be even higher if part of the work, which should normally be done by state institutions, were not taken on by volunteers and activists who help refugees and their relatives. Information and photographs, which are crucial for finding missing persons and identifying the deceased, are most often shared through social media. In the Balkan context, the largest community is the Facebook group “Dead and Missing in the Balkans”. In one of the most recent posts, a girl from Serbia asks for news about Seif, a thirty-year-old man from Tunisia. “He disappeared somewhere between Serbia and Bosnia. He last called his family on 14 May 2019. He has a tattoo on his arm. If you have any information, please contact me via my inbox,” it says under a photo of the young man.

One such initiative allowed the identity of Ahmad Kahlil Ibrahim to be ascertained and his grave to be found. The whole life of that Palestinian was marked by war, exile and suffering. He was born in Syria, where his family had fled during the Arab-Israeli conflict. Ahmad worked as an electrician in his new home, Damascus, and started a family. But another war began, and their house was razed to the ground in 2013, so thirty-three-year-old Ahmad and his wife Rabah fled to Beirut with their three children. Due to the extreme poverty in which they lived in one of the Lebanese refugee camps, Ahmad left in the summer of 2017 for Germany, where two of his cousins live. It took him a year to reach the Bosnian-Croatian border, where he was expelled by the Croatian police. Ahmad’s next crack at the game (an attempt to cross the border) proved fatal. At the end of 2018, his body was found in the River Dobra, in the municipality of Generalski Stol. Since he had no documents with him, he was buried in the local cemetery in Lipa under the designation “Unknown male”.

Silvia Maraone (Photo: Privatna archive)

It probably would have remained that way, had not Silvia Maraone from the Italian non-governmental humanitarian organisation IPSIA (Institute for Peace, Development and Innovation) joined in the story. IPSIA has been present in the countries of former Yugoslavia since the late 1990s. Since the outbreak of the refugee crisis, Maraone has been active along the Balkan route, and in addition to providing direct psychosocial assistance she has helped refugees by publishing useful information on her blog. At the end of 2018, she shared information on people dead and missing in the Balkans. That is why, several months later, she was contacted by Ahmad’s relatives, who asked her to help.

“Since I had no information about the man, I didn’t know what to do. But at the same time, I wanted to help – I guess I thought everything would go smoothly,” Silvia Maraone recalls, who immersed herself in the case in January 2019.

She soon found an item on a local news website about a missing migrant who had fallen into the river near the Skubin Waterfall, and then she contacted several institutions on behalf of Ahmad’s family: the mountain rescue service, the Karlovac police and the Syrian consulate in Zagreb. After the body of a yet unidentified man was found in the River Dobra, she mediated in conducting a DNA analysis, and at the same time she comforted the family of the deceased, who were receiving contradictory information.

“The Red Cross joined in and supported Ahmad’s cousin from Germany in coming to Croatia and giving a blood sample. The victim’s identity was soon confirmed, but another important question still had to be answered: where was Ahmad’s body? A year later, we found out he was buried in Lipa,” Silvia tells us.

The grave of Ahmad Kahlil Ibrahim in Lipa (Photo: Tamara Opačić)

Shortly before the corona pandemic began and the borders were sealed, the Italian aid worker went to that village near Duga Resa, but since Ahmad’s grave was unmarked she was unable to find it. Since it was a Sunday, she went to a nearby church, waited until the end of mass and spoke to the priest.

“A woman, Valentina, soon joined us. She was the most diligent person I could find in that strange place and in this whole chaotic story. As a nurse who had once worked as a volunteer in Syria, she was extremely empathetic. She took me to the grave, which had a cross on it, so I asked her if there was any chance we could arrange it in accordance with Islamic tradition and add Ahmad’s name to it. Although his identity had been established months earlier, no one informed the local community, which went on to performed a wonderful gesture,” Silvia adds.

After Silvia’s visit, residents of Lipa and the surrounding villages set about rearranging Ahmad’s final resting place. They covered the bare earth with decorative pebbles, carved his name and surname, as well as the year and place of his birth and death, in a wooden board, and decorated it with flowers. Thus Ahmad Kahlil Ibrahim was given back at least a part of his dignity, which he was so cruelly divested of two years earlier at the ramparts of Fortress Europe.