An hour’s drive from the Croatian town of Karlovac, down a side road lined with tombstones and houses pocked with bullet holes, there is a desolate border crossing between Croatia and Bosnia. Beyond lays Velika Kladusa, a place that seems to exist only on the map. Between 1993 and 1995 it was the capital of the self-declared Autonomous Republic of Western Bosnia, the fiefdom of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) businessman Fikret Abdic, known for the pacts he made with the Serbs and Croats against his fellow Bosniaks in Sarajevo during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war. Today, it is a transit point for thousands of migrants and refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia trying to enter the European Union via Croatia en route to Western Europe.
