Iraqis given free pass into Lithuania by Europe’s last dictator
Drawing a check blanket over his head, Tamar Heydar doesn’t care if he becomes a pawn in a stand-off between the EU and Belarus. To the young man standing in a tent in the forests of Lithuania, his native Iraq is not safe, and he wants to get into the EU whatever it takes.
“People here are very stressed and angry,” he says to the drum roll of incessant Baltic rain.
“We left our country because it’s dangerous there. We need a safe place.”
Officials in Lithuania are faced with thousands of asylum seekers dropped on its doorstep by the Belarusian regime last month in an apparent act of revenge for the country’s support of Western sanctions.
The unprecedented influx is testing the capacities of this small EU nation to its limits.
And a cold spell in the Baltics this weekend has given a preview of the misery that asylum seekers are likely to face as summer draws to a close.
At a camp near the village of Rudninkai south of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, several hundred men, most from Iraq, roamed soaked paths or lay on camping cots in the morning darkness of tents as water seeped in.
A new crisis broke out at the EU’s eastern border at the end of June when Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko, who has been persecuting his political rivals and ordinary opposition supporters, promised to “flood” Europe with drugs and migrants in retaliation for Western sanctions. Asylum seekers started to show up in droves in the sparsely populated border areas of Lithuania: more than 4,100 people have walked in to be detained by border guards. The number of illegal border crossings in Lithuania for the whole of 2020 was 81.
Gen Rustamas Liubajevas, head of the State Border Guard Service, said the Baltic nation has had to triple border guards in the past two months to cope with a crisis “that was impossible to predict six months ago”.
Lithuanian border officials say their Belarusian counterparts have stopped co-operating with them. They recently released a video shot from a helicopter, showing what they say is a Belarusian border guard vehicle accompanying the migrants to the EU border.
As Lithuania began to buckle under the influx, the EU pledged millions of euros in support.
When a record 287 arrived on Monday, authorities started tracing groups of asylum seekers approaching from Belarus and turning them away. Some 250 people were sent back into Belarus in the past 24 hours, Lithuanian officials said yesterday.
Evidence suggests the Belarusian regime orchestrated the migrant crisis by inviting an unusually high number of flights from Iraq and offering Iraqi citizens tourist visas.
Residents of the camp in the woods outside Rudninkai say they saw adverts on Iraqi social media and newspapers about a month ago, for travel to Belarus: the word was that it was a cheap and easy way into Europe.
The Iraqi government yesterday suspended all flights to Belarus indefinitely and said it would only be sending in empty planes to repatriate Iraqis.
Habib, a 26-year-old Iraqi man who got to Rudninkai five days earlier, paid $900 (£649) for a package tour that included a one-way ticket, transfer from the airport and a night at a hotel in Minsk. He and a group of other Iraqis then drove to a border town and crossed into Lithuania on foot, using an online map.
Like Habib, Mr Heydar, a 22-year-old from the south of Baghdad, says he jumped at the chance. Mr Heydar, who complained about the cold of the Baltic summer and lack of facilities at the camp, says he doesn’t feel cheated.
“Belarus is not using me,” he said. “I’m using Belarus, I can say that. If there’s a chance to go to a safe country, I will take it.”
The villages and towns nestled in this part of Lithuania’s thick forests have been rocked by the news of tent camps springing up nearby.
Several dozen people rallied last week in Rudninkai and just outside the tent camp to protest against plans to host 1,500 asylum seekers there.
Posters saying “No illegals!” still hang on a wicket fence in a street dotted with wooden cottages.
‘We have nothing to do with this. Our presidents, our ministers are at war with each other but we just want our quiet life back’
Feodosiya and Iosif Lukashevich, 72 and 73, who live in a one-storey unvarnished wooden cottage two houses down from the poster, say the fears are overblown.
“They are people just like us,” Mrs Lukashevich said. “If they’re fleeing, that means things are impossible for them at home.” There are some signs that the recent deportations may have disrupted the regime’s plan to wear Lithuania out by sending in migrants.
After weeks of silence on the subject, Belarusian state media last week accused Lithuanian border guards of mistreating asylum seekers and even beating one to death.
Mr Lukashenko on Thursday called Lithuanians “Nazis” for abusing the asylum seekers and ordered his security services to seal the border so that “not a single foot steps into Belarus from the other side”.
At least five asylum seekers were stranded in no-man’s land between the two countries yesterday.
In Pabrade, north-east of Vilnius, the country’s only permanent facility for asylum seekers is expanding. Rows of large army tents are now pitched next to a three-storey building which used to host the few asylum seekers that Lithuania saw in recent years.
In the coming weeks, Lithuania will expand the asylum seekers’ centre here to host an extra 800 people, and two container camps will be built to replace tent camps like the one in Rudninkai, says Gen Liubajevas. But tensions in Pabrade are palpable. “We have nothing to do with this. Our presidents, our ministers are at war with each other but we just want our quiet life back,” said Iolanta Baranowska, a 25-year-old resident. “We hope things will calm down.”