The Polish authorities have absented themselves from responsibility for migrants dying on the border with Belarus, leaving NGOs and activists to find and identify bodies lying in the forest areas.
Volunteer rescuers are the only ones looking for migrants missing on Poland’s border with Belarus. Since the migration crisis on the border exploded into life in 2021, it has happened that a random walker comes across the corpse of a migrant and the Polish authorities are contacted; otherwise, they have left it to us to deal with this terrible situation.
On February 16, 2023, 22 volunteers set out to search the Bialowieza Forest in the first collective search for a missing migrant organised by the Podlaskie Voluntary Humanitarian Rescue Service (POPH). We were looking for Abdulkareem from Yemen, who had gone missing near Czerlonka a couple of weeks earlier.
We had no illusions; we knew that we were likely looking for a body. In extremely difficult surroundings, trekking around the swamps and windbreaks, we tried to walk in a line a couple of metres from one another, as scientists from the Institute of Mammal Biology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Bialowieza had taught us.
Around noon, Agnieszka Pilecka, a photographer involved in providing humanitarian aid to migrants, noticed something.
“A body!” she cried out.
“Body! Body!” the other volunteers echoed.
We broke the line, carefully approaching a small depression in the ground. What we saw was an unnaturally small pile of bones and tissue amongst the scraps of clothes that had been dragged around by wild animals. The head was intact, but there was little chance of promptly identifying the deceased. Next to the remains was an empty phone case and strewn around were soaked ID photos.
We did everything in our power to give the deceased a name and a past. Ultimately, it turned out this was not the man that we were looking for, but 24-year-old Abdi Biratu Fite from the town of Nekemtie in the Oromia province of Ethiopia – a Christian, local youth leader, and computer science graduate from the University of Amboo.
Abdi’s identity was established by Piotr Czaban, a journalist and POPH activist, together with Malgorzata Rycharska from Hope&Humanity Poland. They suspected the deceased was an Ethiopian citizen who went missing in December 2022 in this locale. He was part of a group of five Ethiopians who were wet, hungry and in despair when they had contacted local activists asking for help.
The quest for a better life did not end well for any of them. A second man in the group died in Belarus after Polish border guards pushed a group that included him back out of Poland without providing any help, Czaban later discovered. He and other activists receive hundreds of calls from families looking for disappeared loved ones and that is how he came into contact with Abdi’s family, who had been searching for the young man’s whereabouts.
Czaban showed Abdi’s family the photos found in the forest, which began a several-months-long procedure of officially establishing his identity, applying for a visa for the deceased’s brother so that DNA could be compared, and eventually organising the funeral. While it is normally the responsibility of state authorities to deal with these matters, they have neither the capacity nor – in many cases – the will to deal with missing migrants, leaving much of the work on the shoulders of activists like Czaban.
We buried Abdi on June 10, 2023 at the parish cemetery in Bialowieza. The ceremony was led by the same pastor, Krzysztof Flasza, who just a few weeks earlier had conducted the funeral of 44-year-old Livine Solange Njengoue Nguekam from Cameroon. Her body was found by a border guard patrol in the border river of Swislocz on February 16, 2023, the same day we found Abdi in the forest.
Many others missing
These are far from the only corpses lying undiscovered in the Polish woods. According to the statements of many migrants made to myself and other journalists and activists, they have experienced pushbacks, cold and miserable conditions, and violence from border guards of both sides. We first started suspecting there were bodies in the forest as early as the fall of 2021, when migrants who had made it over the border started recounting their experiences.
Already in September 2021, a group of Iraqi and Turkish Kurds I spoke to were insisting that there were many bodies lying in the border forests. When I met them, they were desperate to avoid being sent back to Belarus and requested asylum in front of the guardhouse in Michalowo.
At the time I was working as a journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza, covering the humanitarian disaster on the border which was being fomented by the regime of Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko with Russia’s assistance in order to destabilise the EU through artificially generated migration pressures.
One Kurdish refugee in the Michalowo group was explaining why it would be dangerous for them to be returned to Belarus and the fate that awaited them if they were pushed back into the forests: there were bodies there, he had seen them, and they didn’t want their children to die in the same place and in the same manner. There were nine children in this group of Kurds, one not even a year old. We made a video of them and I asked my Kurdish friends to help with the translation. Ultimately, however, this group was pushed back in Belarus and I don’t know what happened to them after that.
How many bodies out there?
According to my calculations, based on police and prosecution office statistics as well as reports collected by activists, the number of victims of this deadly game of ping-pong at the border exceeds 60. This figure rises to around 130 when Belarus’s borders with Latvia and Lithuania are included, according to the report “No Safe Passage”, published last year by Fundacja Ocalenie together with three other humanitarian NGOs from the Baltics and Belarus.
Katarzyna Czarnota, a sociologist with the Helsinki Foundation For Human Rights (HFHR) and co-author of the first comprehensive analysis into the issue, “Disappearances on the Polish-Belarusian border: Pushbacks as a factor in enforced disappearances in Poland”, is trying to arrive at a more exact figure.
Thanks to the efforts of civil society organisations and We Are Monitoring association, HFHR has been able to examine approximately 400 unstructured and uncategorised reports of individuals reported missing in the border zone, either temporarily or permanently, between the autumn of 2021 and August 2023.
After eliminating duplicates, Czarnota found that 374 cases of lost contact were verified, involving 80 women and 284 men, including 39 minors and 149 adults (in other cases, the age and/or gender could not be confirmed). Of these, 174 cases indicated the disappearances occurred in Poland (130 people), Belarus (36), Latvia (3), Lithuania (2) and Ukraine (3). In 39 cases, the exact location of the disappearance was not specified. Between August 2023 and the end of June 2024, HFHR received information on a further 57 missing persons. Undocumented pushbacks by the Polish Border Guard should be considered as a key factor in the rising number of fatalities and disappearances.
Among the estimated 130 deaths, the most shocking case for me was that of a pregnant Kurdish woman, Avin Irfan Zahir. Because of the dire conditions in the forests, the 24-week-old foetus died inside her. She herself died a few weeks later in hospital from complications.
Given the difference in the number of confirmed deaths and the number of the disappeared, it is clear there are many more unidentified bodies lying in the forests, despite the desperate appeals of their families to the authorities to help locate them.
“There is no institution or actor who can provide accurate or verifiable data, as the state has created this ‘grey zone’ of violence. No one can properly estimate how many victims of the border crisis have passed away in the border zone… There are no search-and-rescue mechanisms and the criminalisation of humanitarian aid is also rising,” says Czarnota.
“In Poland, there is a need to implement the system of guidelines for the search of missing persons developed by the Committee on Enforced Disappearances (“Guiding Principles for the Search for Disappeared Persons”), in particular in the following cases: conducting search operations for an individual until their fate has been determined, respecting the right to participate in the search, and taking into account vulnerable migrant groups, including children. The immediate cessation of pushback practices, which are incompatible with national and international law, is also necessary. If not, the number of fatalities and missing people will rise gradually each year, especially during winter time,” Czarnota says.
On January 13, 2023, an army patrol in the Bialowieza Forest came across the body of a man and the remains of another, just the skull. The Polish Border Guard immediately initiated a search after the soldiers indicated there were likely more victims where they had found the first two bodies, but it gave up the effort quickly. Our group of activists, volunteers and journalists under the banner of Podlaskie Voluntary Humanitarian Rescue Service (POPH) kept searching and on February 12, 2023, in the suburbs of Hajnowka, Czaban and Katarzyna Mazurkiewicz-Bylok found the body of a woman, 28-year-old Mahlet Kassa, a teacher from Ethiopia, alongside a prayer book with images of Christian saints lying next to her. They had been looking for her for a week, at the request of her relatives.
The bodies of Mahlet Kassa and the others deserve to be found and buried, their families deserve information so they can mourn the death of a loved one. Only activists and volunteers are looking for these bodies, because they believe it cannot be right that people are dying in our forests and being eaten by wild animals.
The volunteers and activists pay a huge price for this – we are all civilians and none of us are prepared for playing such a role. As such, we have an antipathy towards our state, especially to the current liberal-democratic government of Donald Tusk. While it was foreseeable that an authoritarian government led by Law and Justice, a right-wing populist party, would ignore the law and persecute activists, we have been amazed that such practices have continued under the new government which took office in December 2023.
We had hopes that a change of government would mean human rights, international law and domestic law will start to be respected. However, we still see pushbacks happening and more find bodies turning up in the forests. The latest was in November 28, 2024, when workers maintaining the border fence came across a man’s body near Lipszczany. As the prosecutor’s office announced, the victim was a 28-year-old man from Eritrea and the cause of death was most likely hypothermia.