The project
The “Border Memory” project was launched by Collettivo Rotte Balcaniche, an Italian-based collective of activists and volunteers that since 2018 is supporting people on the move stranded on the eastern borders of Europe. We started to know the Balkan routes from Bosnia, where thousands of people were brutally pushed-back by the Croatian police. From Bihac and Velika Kladusa we moved to the Subotica area, on the border between Serbia and Hungary, and then on to Bulgaria, in 2023, having heard about the extreme violence of Bulgarian police. We always tried to move with the people, where the need was greatest and state violence most acute and undisturbed, on the one hand to build safe and solidarity spaces for people on the move, on the other to be an unpleasant presence for the authorities, as sand in the gears of the border.
Over the past year, on the Bulgarian-Turkish border we have been dedicated to the search and rescue of people in distress during the journey, creating a “safeline” able to directly reach the border locations, addressing emergencies and preventing push-backs. In these operations, we came across dozens of cases of border deaths and “missing persons”, i.e. people whose contacts were lost during the journey and never found, for weeks, months, years. We have seen the difficulties and the struggle of families to identify and get back the body of a son or a brother, to have at least the right to mourn, but also the endless grief of not knowing the truth, of vain searches and unanswered questions, of deliberate attempts to conceal the facts by the authorities.
The Border Memory project stems from this desperation and anger. It is a search for answers that should be due, but also the beginning of a common struggle so that there will be no more border deaths. Indeed, we believe that sharing individual sufferings with the many who are in the same situation and those in solidarity not only can help in facing these hardships, but also become collective strength and action.
Inspired by other experiences in the central Mediterranean route and the route to North America, this project stems from the need to not forget both the dead and the missing, to build a collective counter-memory of borders: of institutional violence but also of the resistance of those who challenge it and who fight for their loved ones. In this sense, memory can become a mean of struggle.
In particular, Border Memory is about tracing cases of dead and missing and activate searches, while building cross-borders alliances of struggle and solidarity to fight this deadly regime. It was born from the encounter between the activists of Collettivo and the families of some missing persons in Bulgaria.
The website includes two forms in many languages to signal the disappearance or the death of a person, stories and maps related to the reports, and various contributions on the subject.
The scope of our action for now is mainly related to Bulgaria, where we are present in the field, but we would like to expand the project to the whole Balkans, to countries such as Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, etc. where many people similarly die and disappear crossing the borders into Europe. For this, we welcome and seek the cooperation of all people and groups who share our goals and methods.
It is not a matter of statistics or labels, but of fighting together.
