Border wall called huge double standard
A year after migrants started crossing into the European Union from Belarus to Poland, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and top security officials visited the border to mark the completion of a new steel wall.
Yesterday, Polish authorities lifted a state of emergency along the border that has blocked journalists, rights workers and others from witnessing a human rights crisis.
At the very least, 20 migrants have died in the area’s freezing forests and bogs.
The Polish government characterises the wall as part of the fight against
Russia; human rights defenders see it as representing a huge double standard, with groups of white Christian refugees from Ukraine made up mostly of women welcomed but predominantly male Muslims from Syria and other countries rejected and mistreated.
“The first sign of the war in Ukraine was (Belarus President) Alexander Lukashenko’s attack on the Polish border with Belarus,” Morawiecki told a news conference.
“It was thanks to (our) political foresight and the anticipation of what may happen that we may focus now on helping Ukraine, which is fighting to protect its sovereignty.”
As Poland opened its gates to millions of Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion, work was well underway to build the 5.5m high wall along 186km of its northern frontier with Belarus. It still needs electronic surveillance systems to be installed.
It is meant to keep out asylum seekers of a different type: those fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East and Africa, who were encouraged to try their luck by Belarus’ authoritarian regime — a close ally of Russia — as part of a feud with the EU.
“If you give a lift to a refugee at the Ukrainian border you are a hero. If you do it at the Belarus border you are a smuggler and could end up in jail for eight years,” said Natalia Gebert, founder and chief executive of Dom Otwarty, or Open House, a Polish NGO that helps refugees.
Belarus had never before been a key migration route into the EU — until its President Alexander Lukashenko began encouraging would-be asylum-seekers in the Middle East to travel to Minsk. Soon, people from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and African countries flocked to the EU’s eastern edge, entering Poland and neighbouring Lithuania and Latvia.