Poland-Belarus border wall built
WARSAW, Poland — 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 area on Thursday to mark the completion of a new steel wall.
Today, Polish authorities will also lift 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 characterizes 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,” Morawiecki said.
As Poland opened its gates to millions of Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion, work was well underway to build the 18-foot high wall along 115 miles of its northern frontier with Belarus. It still needs electronic surveillance systems to be installed.
It’s 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.
One of the asylum-seekers was 32-year-old Ali, who left Syria late last year after reading on social media that the easiest way into the EU was to fly to Belarus and walk into Poland.
Ali, from a village outside Hama in western Syria, flew to the Belarusian capital, Minsk, and set out to find an unguarded spot in the forest where he could sneak over into the EU.
“I was looking for a place where I can live in safety, away from the oppression and hopelessness back home,” he said in an interview this week with The Associated Press in Berlin.
Ali, who didn’t give his last name, fearing repercussions for his family, was not prepared for the violence and sub-zero temperatures that awaited him in the vast forests and swamps.
“There were nights when I went to sleep on the bare ground in the woods thinking I would not wake up again,” Ali said.
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 neighboring Lithuania and Latvia.
EU leaders accused Lukashenko of waging “hybrid warfare” in revenge for the bloc’s sanctions over the regime’s treatment of dissidents. Poland’s government says Russia is complicit, given Lukashenko’s alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Though migration slowed in the winter, people continued to try to enter the EU through Poland, a route seen as less dangerous than crossing the Mediterranean Sea, where many have drowned in past years, Gebert said.
A Human Rights Watch report last month said Poland “unlawfully, and sometimes violently, summarily pushes migrants and asylum-seekers back to Belarus, where they face serious abuses, including beatings and rape by border guards and other security forces.”
Amnesty International has also detailed serious human rights abuses.
While some Poles support the government’s tough stance, many border region residents have throughout the winter and spring sought to help migrants trapped in the forest, several requiring medical help.