Barbara Matejčić, a freelance journalist from Croatia, has had the 'List of Refugee Deaths' - a record of people who tried to reach safety in the EU from 1993 to present day - printed out on her desk for a long time. This 'catalogue of refugee despair and the cruelty of Europe's border regime' has served as a reminder that she needs to do something about it. In 2024, she took part in a major award-winning cross-border journalism project that confirmed over 1 000 unmarked graves of migrants across Europe over the last decade. Her story Unmarked monuments of EU's shame in Croatia and Bosnia chronicles state-linked deaths along the treacherous Balkan route.

By Barbara Matejčić

As I write this, on 13 January, in Zagreb, the odds are high that someone out there on the so-called Balkan route is dying. The temperatures are below freezing; the rivers are icy, swollen, and fast-flowing, and the mountains and forests are covered in snow. People have no other way to reach the European Union and ask for asylum, so they take high-risk routes. And they do not die 'only' because they drowned, fell fatally or froze to death. They also die because the police shoot at the boats in which they cross rivers, as happened to 20-year-old Arat Semiullah from Afghanistan, whose funeral prayer I attended in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They also die because the police refuse to respond to their repeated cries for help, as in the case of three minors from Egypt who froze to death in a Bulgarian forest in late 2024.

The root of my journalistic work on migrant deaths along the Balkan route lies in the 'List of Refugee Deaths’,  compiled by UNITED, a European network of activists and non-governmental organisations. The list documents information from 1993 to the present, about who has died, where, when, how and under what circumstances, while trying to reach Europe or somewhere within Europe. Many of those on the list were refugees fleeing the wars in the former Yugoslav countries. Eleven-year-old Jasminka from Bosnia died in 1994 after her Roma family was set on fire in a refugee centre in Cologne. Lejla Ibrahimović from Bosnia took her own life on 4 December 1994 in Birmingham after the British Interior Ministry refused to grant a visa to her husband Safet. Many people on the list tragically died by suicide.

Many did so after their asylum applications were refused, or before they were due to be deported from the European country they had managed to reach or in protest of the long wait for their asylum requests to be resolved. In the summer of 1995, Todor Bogdanović from Yugoslavia was shot by French police in the mountains near the border with Italy. He was eight years old. Refugees from former Yugoslav countries crossed the borders with documents and received protection in European countries, similar to Ukrainian refugees since the war in Ukraine began. But even then, some could not cross the border legally and tried to reach safety in Western Europe by any means they could, just as non-European refugees have done over the past decade. We don't know about those deaths from the 1990s, just as we don’t know much about the ones happening today.

Twelve years ago, I printed out that list, and it has been sitting on my desk ever since as a reminder that I need to do something about it. For me, no photograph, no text, no documentary about refugees is as heart-wrenching as that bare list of dead people. Those densely written pages are a catalogue of refugee despair and the cruelty of Europe's border regime.

As a reporter, I have covered various aspects of migration, including illegal pushbacks and police violence, particularly by the Croatian police, over the past decade. I started focusing on deaths in 2023. I toured cemeteries with activists in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, sent hundreds of inquiries to state bodies, spoke to the loved ones of the deceased. It is the activists, not the police, that migrants call when their life is in danger. It is the activists who help relatives find those who have disappeared after losing contact with them. It is activists who try to identify the dead, and put up permanent gravestones. This network of compassionate people does the work that should be done by institutions.

The text Unmarked monuments of EU's shame in Croatia and Bosnia is part of what I published, and it was created as part of an international journalistic investigation into migrant deaths at the external borders of the European Union, which I conducted together with colleagues from Greece, Italy, Spain, and Poland. The series titled 1000 Lives, 0 Names: The Border Graves Investigation won the 2024 Special Award European Press Prize and Investigative Journalism for EU Impact Award (IJ4EU). 

Based in Zagreb, Croatia, Barbara Matejčić is an award-wining freelance journalist, non-fiction writer, editor, researcher and audio producer focused on social affairs and human rights in the Balkan region. She has won several awards, including the Investigative Journalism for Europe award (2024) and the European Press Prize (2024). The Croatian Journalists’ Association named her best print journalist in Croatia for her features about post-war societies in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. She writes for Croatian and international media and produces multimedia projects. She lectures in Journalism Studies at the University of VERN in Zagreb. You can find out more about Barbara's work at barbaramatejcic.com