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Stories from the Barracks
“We are gonna play the game”, several men living in the ‘Barracks’ in Belgrade tell me, meaning they are going try to cross the border this night. Most of them have already tried more than once, yet were pushed back by the police to this transit space. The Barracks is the name migrants have given to a crumbling collection of buildings in a neglected part of the city’s waterfront, which companies from the United Arab Emirates are transforming into a new touristic and commercial area.
This place became a sort of movie set in the first weeks of 2017, when TV crews from several countries came to film hundreds of people living in the snow. About 1000 migrants wait, many of them minors. I meet an eight-year-old child who lives there alone, he tells me, because his father is in a migrant detention centre in Croatia. People live here if they do not find a place in one of the 17 governmental reception centres, which combined can host up to 6,300 persons. They also stay in the Barracks because this is the place from which they can easily arrange passage to Hungary or Croatia. Every day about 20 people try, but only two or three manage to reach those countries.
