A playground in Zagreb could be named after Madina Hussiny, a six-year-old Afghan girl killed by a train while crossing the Croatia-Serbia border on 21 November 2017, the city administration and the sponsor of the proposal, the Zagreb - grad utociste initiative (Zagreb - Haven City) have told the Croatian state news agency Hina.

The City Assembly’s committee on naming districts, streets and squares last week unanimously adopted a conclusion that a public area should be named after Hussiny, committee chair Rada Boric said, adding that the final decision is up to the Assembly.

Activist Selma Banich has told Hina the initiative is supported by numerous individuals and some 50 collectives and organisations.

The proposal is for the playground in Ribnjak Park in the centre of Zagreb to be named after Hussiny, she says, adding that this would have symbolic as well as social importance “for the coming generations, who should grow up in a society which nurtures the policy of welcome.”

Banich says the initiative brings together everyone who believes Zagreb can and should be a city permanently open for all and wants everyone in Zagreb to enjoy equal rights.

She says Hussiny was killed after “Croatian police expelled her and her family across the green border into Serbia.” Like many from third countries with which Croatia has a rigorous visa regime, they had to cross the green border, hiding from police, she adds.

Banich says that although the Hussiny family “evidently needed international protection” and “according to the mother, explicitly asked for asylum,” police escorted Madina, her mother and her five brothers and sisters to the border and “ordered them to follow the railway to Sid,” where Madina was killed by a train.

Despite investigations into her death, including proceedings at the Croatian Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights, Banich says that “those guilty for Madina’s death have neither been found nor punished.”

“Madina has become a symbol of the suffering on migrant routes through Croatia and the surrounding countries, a symbol of death on borders, but also of justice and resistance to policies which envisage and produce such deaths,” she says.

The proposal to name part of a Zagreb park after Madina is also a political demand “focussed on the abolition of borders and all forms of border violence, and thereby migration laws which work against man’s freedom. In order to remember those killed while opposing with their lives the European death regime, Republic of Croatia Square must be… Madina Hussiny Square,” Banich says.

The proposal to name a Zagreb playground after Hussiny, she adds, is also a gesture of public condemnation of “the Croatian (and European) regime of death and a demand for the political, societal, institutional and personal responsibility for the crimes committed.”

A year ago, the ECHR found that in Hussiny’s case Croatia violated the right to life, to ban torture, inhumane treatment and collective expulsion, and the rights to safety and freedom. The decision was delivered in a procedure instigated by the Hussiny family.

The Centre for Peace Studies says that by naming a street or square after Madina “as we wait for Croatia to carry out an efficient investigation, sanction those responsible and stop illegal practices,” Zagreb could symbolically honour the girl whose name “would remain a lasting symbol of the fight for justice.”