How Bosnia became a destination for Arabs over the last 100 years TRT World August 22, 2019 First as Hajj surrogates and now as refugees - this is the tale of how the presence of Arabs in Bosnia has transformed over the years. On a July evening in downtown Sarajevo, Arab families make up the vast majority of guests in a luxury hotel. Several hundred meters away, a migrant from an Arab country stops passersby asking for 1 KM ($0.57). The presence and visibility of both affluent tourists and migrants from Arab countries has become a familiar sight of a Sarajevo summer. With tourists from Arab countries flocking to Bosnia over the past several years, many were quick to point out that this is a new trend in the post-war country. The arrival of Arabs in Bosnia is not an entirely new development - there have been at least five waves of Arab arrivals over the last 100 years. In the early part of the 20th century, before the discovery of oil, Arabs came to Bosnia seeking to be surrogates for Hajj pilgrims. The term bedel denotes a person who travels to perform the Hajj on behalf of a sick, elderly or a deceased relative. A family sending a bedel pays for the costs of the pilgrimage as well as an additional amount for the effort. Bosnian chronicler Alija Nametak wrote in 1941 of how Arab visitors seeking to be bedels for Bosnians used to visit Sarajevo and other towns mostly during Ramadan. Spending a Ramadan in Sarajevo allowed a potential bedel to find affluent families seeking to pay for the pilgrimage of a loved one. The second phase of Arab arrivals to Bosnia was mostly in the 1970s. Bosnia was then a part of the socialist Yugoslavia which was sympathetic to the Arab countries. Yugoslavia had, by the late 1960s, rebuilt from World War II and was seeking to punch above its weight diplomatically under Josip Broz Tito. Students from Arab countries arrived in Yugoslavia in the 1970s to pursue higher education. Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, Libyans and Iraqis studied in Sarajevo, Belgrade and Zagreb. While many returned home, several highly educated doctors stayed in Bosnia. Students of 1970s are still working in Bosnia in today and are nearing their retirement. The third wave of Arab arrivals was during the war in Bosnia from 1992-1995. With the newly independent republic under attack, Arabs came to Bosnia both as aid workers and as combatants. Curtailed in its ability to defend itself due to a UN-imposed arms embargo, any assistance to Bosnia was welcomed. With aid sometimes came strings attached in the form of new