Former NATO Workers to Protest in Bosnia

People who worked for the NATO Stabilisation Force SFOR in Bosnia and its successor, the European Union Force EUFOR, will stage a protest in front of the EUFOR and NATO Headquarters in Butmir near Sarajevo on Friday.

They claim that they were not given the benefits to which they were entitled because they were not classified as employees by NATO or EUFOR.

Since 2010, the former workers have been seeking benefits they would have received if they had been classified as employees, such as healthcare and pension contributions, travel costs to work and severance pay.

So far they have not succeeded in getting any of these benefits, said an open letter from their lawyers.

"All I had, during my time with SFOR, which today is EUFOR, was a salary, and I had to pay from that amount myself for healthcare and a pension; not even travel costs were covered and that is why I will go out and protest as, I hope, most of my former co-workers will," Fedja Poskovic, one of the former workers, told BIRN.

Poskovic said that the former workers want to have the rights that are guaranteed by Bosnia's laws.

Avdo Salihbegovic and Hajrudin Kapetanovic, the lawyers who sent the open letter, accused the international forces of taking an unscrupulous and illegal attitude to the former workers, who number around 20,000.

A previous protest over the issue in March 2016 drew fewer than 1,000 former workers, however.

Commissions set up by NATO in the past to examine the issue have concluded that the Western military alliance was not at fault.

The lawyers claimed that the workers' views were ignored by the commissions.

But NATO has insisted that it acted correctly.

"All of the contracts in NATO and EUFOR are based on national (domestic)...