BELARUS CLEARS BORDER MIGRANT CAMP
Belarusian authorities on Thursday cleared the encampments at the main border crossing into Poland, where thousands of migrants had been living in frigid and increasingly squalid conditions.
The patch of land nicknamed “the jungle” by migrants — only days ago the site of violent clashes between asylum seekers trying to push through the razor wire and Polish security forces blasting them with water cannons — quickly became a wasteland of garbage, abandoned tents and smoldering fires.
The clearing of the camps eased the immediate suffering of the migrants who had been living in the open air in miserable conditions, as they were moved by Belarusian authorities into a giant warehouse. And it took pressure off a border that the European Union had been watching with growing alarm, fearing that it would be breached by a new wave of migrants, even if Western leaders are skeptical that the volatile standoff is drawing to a close.
The situation also left the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, with a troubling dilemma: what to do with all the people he lured to Belarus but who, blocked from entering Europe, are fast becoming a heavy burden on his own country?
On Thursday, escorted by Belarusian guards, a bedraggled procession of migrants trudged away from the frontier, abandoning their encampments on the border like a routed army.
Zana Ahmed, a 26-yearold Iraqi Kurd who spent around $5,000 to get to the border with Poland, just yards from making it into the European Union, vowed to stay in Belarus “until I die” unless he somehow gained entry to Europe.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has taken the lead in trying to find a diplomatic way out of the crisis, talking with Lukashenko, but has given no hint that she will repeat the welcome offer she made to migrants in 2015, when more than 1 million people poured into Germany.