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Mental status of single men travelling the Balkan Route
The European Union is the point of arrival for all the migrants on the Balkan Route. Since the out brake of this phenomenon in 2015, this tough path, that brings migrants into the EU by land, has seen hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. Afghans, Pakistani, Iranian now, but also Syrians, Iraqi and people from Northern Africa. More than half of these migrants are single men between the age of 15 and 30 years old. They have been on this trip for years, alone. They have crossed illegally the many borders they have encountered, they have walked through the entire Bosnia and Herzegovina and now they have been stuck in the north-west of the country, in the Una-Sana Canton, the area nearest to the Croatian border.
In the area there are few Temporary Reception Centres (TRC) for asylum seeker, but since their establishment, they were clearly insufficient. Being perceived as a “less vulnerable category” and due to the few resources available, single men have less possibility to be admitted into the receptive structures, and consequently to enjoy fewer concessions, fewer rights and less care. Precluding them the access to TRC, it will dramatically avoid them the possibility to apply for the necessary psychological support, increasing the use of alcohol, drugs and antidepressant medicines, with direct negative effect such as abuse and dependence on young and fragile people.
Awaiting for the winter season to pass, migrants look for the right conditions to attempt again to the game. This is how the migrants call that two to three weeks long path, the trip that takes them through Croatia, Slovenia and finally in Italy, the last bulwark before reaching the EU. Each of them has tried this path at least twice, some even dozens of times, and the fact that they are represented through these portraits means that each time they have been caught and sent forcibly back to Bosnia and Herzegovina, suffering the theft of all their belongings, physical and psychological abuses and, above all, they have been denied their rights as asylum seekers.
Frustration, sadness, solitude, uncertainty, fear. These are the feelings that run through the mind of these guys. In this modern representation of the Rorschach tables, where the migrants are themselves the inkblots of the tables, they look straight into their past and at their future, to forget this present time who is stealing them the youth, the light-heartedness belonging to those years, but it will definitely never steal them their dreams.
Bosnia and Herzegovina, January 2021