Drowning in the Balkans: ‘His body went away with the water’

On this route to Western Europe, refugees and migrants brave perilous river crossings that often end in tragedy.

It was around two in the morning, Tahsan* remembers, when the man drowned. A group of around 35 men from Pakistan and Bangladesh had crossed the border from Bosnia into Croatia that night in March this year, the beginning of a two-week journey through dense forests and over snow-capped mountains from the Bosnian border to Italy. Refugees and migrants call these attempts to cross borders “the game”, but the trip is never undertaken lightly. All the clothes they owned, all the food they would eat for the next 14 days and much of the water they would drink, the men carried on their backs. Just 20km (12.5 miles) past the border, the men reached the Glina river, which Tahsan, 22, remembers as being about 25 metres wide. Although it had been warm during the day, in March the temperature in the area drops to -1 or -2 Celsius at night. About 15 of the men jumped in and tried to swim to the other side, “but one man became very cold, and he couldn’t swim”, Tahsan, from Bangladesh, explains. When we speak three months after the incident, close to his tent encampment in northwest Bosnia (the men never made it through Croatia), Tahsan is too frightened to reveal his real name because he fears retaliation not only from the authorities but also from the other men he was with that night who may be angry that he is even speaking about it.