Western countries slam Belarus over migrant crisis
UNITED NATIONS, United States: European countries and the US condemned Belarus Thursday over a crisis that has seen hundreds of migrants trapped on its border with Poland, after an emergency meeting at the UN Security Council on the tense standoff between Minsk and the EU.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has urged the EU to start talks with diplomatically isolated Belarus over the roughly 2,000 migrants, mainly Kurds from the Middle East, who are living in a tent camp on the border between Belarus and Poland in near-freezing temperatures.
Poland is refusing to allow the migrants to cross, accusing Minsk of luring them to Belarus to send across the border in revenge for sanctions.
After an emergency meeting at the UN Security Council on the crisis the US and European delegations condemned “the orchestrated instrumentalization of human beings whose lives and wellbeing have been put in danger for political purposes by Belarus.”
Minsk is aiming at “destabilising neighbouring countries and the European Union’s external border and diverting attention away from its own increasing human rights violations,” they said in a joint statement.
The statement made no mention of Belarus ally Russia, which before the meeting
Minsk is aiming at destabiliSing neighbouring countries and the European Union’s external border and diverting attention away from its own increasing human rights violations.
Joint Statement
rejected western allegations that it was working in conjunction with Minsk to send the migrants over the EU’s eastern border into Poland.
And in his second phone call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in as many days, Putin “spoke in favour of restoring contacts between EU states and Belarus in order to resolve this problem,” the Kremlin said in a statement.
The EU has so far refused any direct contacts with Belarus’s strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who on Thursday warned that any new sanctions could see Minsk cut off natural gas transit to Europe.
The bloc severed contacts with Lukashenko and imposed sanctions after a heavy crackdown on the opposition following a disputed presidential election last year.
The EU is expected to decide next week to impose new sanctions on Belarus for human trafficking because of the migrant crisis. Lukashenko said Thursday that Minsk “must respond” if the EU takes new measures, raising the possibility of cutting off transit through a pipeline that carries Russian natural gas through Belarus to Poland and further into Europe.
Belarussian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya said Lukashenko was bluffing about cutting off gas and urged the EU to stand firm.
“It would be more harmful for him, for Belarus, than for the European Union and I can suppose it’s bluffing,” Tikhanovskaya, who fled Belarus after claiming victory in last year’s vote, told AFP in Berlin.
“We are grateful for the principled position of European countries that they are not going to communicate with (an) illegitimate person,” she said.
Poland has deployed 15,000 troops along its border, put up a fence topped with barbed wire and approved construction of a wall on the frontier with Belarus.