Refugees in a video: Hundreds of people walking on a street. We show the background to this video, which was shared very frequently on Facebook and WhatsApp in 2019.
The video is accompanied by dramatic music: hundreds of people, who are refugees, walk down a street. A police car drives in front of the people.
The person with the camera walks along the group. You can clearly see that there are a lot of people involved. The comments and descriptions on Facebook are correspondingly alarming. Here you can read, among other things:
Pictures from Slovenia. If this isn't an invasion, then what is?
Let's therefore look at the origin, age and context of the video in the fact check.
Fact check: origin
According to the description you read Slovenia at this point. To check this, in the first step we only have the license plate number of the police vehicle behind which the refugees are walking.
The vehicle and license plate do not look like Slovenia at this point. Slovenian license plates have two letters first ( compare ). However, this license plate is one from Bosnia ( compare ). This type of police vehicle also exists in Bosnia ( see here ).
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Accordingly, the video probably does not come from Slovenia, but from Bosnia. At this point (with the correct keyword “Bosnia”) the search is quite easy: the people in the video are refugees who are being taken to the Vučjak camp near the city of Bihać.
Fact check dude
The video was actually made just a few days ago. It is a video that was also published on the YouTube channel of the Bosnian news website USKinfo October 16, 2019 see here ). In addition to this video, you can also find other videos that show the situation on site:
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There are also various shots of the group of refugees on the way to the camp (see here and here ).
Fact check context
Camp Vučjak near the city of Bihać is not unknown: it is a camp that is more of an emergency shelter for refugees who had no place in other centers. For example, WDR wrote about it in June 2019 ( see here ):
On June 14, 2019, the first refugees from the Bosnian city of Bihac were taken to a former garbage dump ten kilometers away. Since then, between 600 and 1,200 people have lived there in a very small space.
[…]
All major aid organizations refused to work in Vucjak because it was a camp set up illegally by the Bosnian authorities, the Dortmund resident criticizes: “The hygienic conditions in the camp are inhumane. There are only eight toilets for all camp residents. The excrement runs into the open field 5 meters behind the toilets”.
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Camp Vučjak was built on a former landfill and the situation on site is not unknown. Spiegel TV published a report about the camp in July 2019 and also reported on the refugees there. Spiegel TV describes the report:
Half of Europe is struggling for morality and humanity in dealing with boat refugees on the Mediterranean. But there is another place where refugees also arrive, every day. In Bihac, Bosnia, the arrivals are accommodated in a former garbage dump.
Small detail info: The police car in the mirror video is the same as in our opening video.
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Bihać is a stopover on the way through Eastern Europe to Central and Western Europe. Many refugees are stuck at the border and the camps are therefore overcrowded. The Vučjak camp, illegally set up by the city authorities, is a response to the overcrowded camps. Around 7,000 migrants live here (information varies slightly) who are waiting to continue their journey through Croatia.
This is also described in an article in the NZZ from September 2019. There it says :
Thousands of migrants are stranded in Bihac in western Bosnia on their way to Western Europe. This is a huge burden for the small town, especially since the state is failing to help.
There are also poor forecasts for the winter. This is what volunteers, like the German Dirk Planert, reported (see WDR article and also News.at ):
Dirk Planert fears that he and the team will also have to spend the winter in camp. “If that is the case, I will buy body bags beforehand.
Tougher action against refugees
The current situation has worsened again because the mayor of Bihać, Šuhret Fazlić, said at a press conference on October 16, 2019 that the city no longer wants to provide aid to the camp in Vučjak from Monday (October 21, 2019). In his own words, he wants to escalate the crisis there.
His goal: Through this escalation, he wants to get the state to take over aid for the illegally established camp and ultimately relieve the budget of the city of Bihać. More about the press conference in this article .
Conclusion
The video is not fake (only the information about Slovenia is incorrect). Despite announcements by the mayor to escalate the situation on site, an estimated 1,500 more refugees have arrived in Vučjak in the last few days. We see exactly these people in the video described at the beginning.
Additional sources and reporting:
This might also be of interest:
The topic of “refugees” is currently increasingly being discussed on social media again. Example:
Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )