With the EU slapping new sanctions on Minsk and claims the Belarusians are trying to force the migrants they are herding over the Polish border to provoke violent incidents, the plight of those stuck on the border promises to get worse before it gets better.
It’s almost midnight in a forest near the village of Narewka, located about 10 kilometres away from Poland’s eastern border with Belarus, and a family of Iraqi Kurds are squatting, holding their breath, as footsteps approach.
The three children, aged between five and six, understand the situation clearly. As soon as an adult in the group whispers “police, shh!” the kids quieten down right away and lie low. The family, which also includes a mother who is sick and her teenage daughters, has made it into Poland and they don’t want to be pushed back into Belarus. In their assessment of the situation, this means hiding from the Polish border guards, who could force this family back over the border, as they have done before, if they discover them.
The family are lucky this time – the approaching footsteps are those of volunteer doctors who are helping the migrants stuck in the border area. They give medicines to the mother and walk off.
These Iraqi Kurds have been in the border area for over two weeks now, pushed back and forth between Belarus and Poland multiple times. With temperatures at night dropping below freezing, they have been walking around in wet clothes that are by now ragged.
One of the volunteers offering food and clothes to the group says that since she started helping out at the border, she has the impression that the volunteers and refugees have started giving off a common body odour: could it be the smell of fear, she wonders?
This Iraqi Kurdish family is among thousands of migrants, primarily from the Middle East, who since the summer have tried to make it into Europe via Belarus. That country’s dictator, President Aleksandr Lukashenko, has created this new migratory route both in retaliation for EU sanctions imposed after the rigged 2020 presidential election, as well as to help serve Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal of destabilising NATO and the EU, security experts say.
The Polish government has responded by ordering border guards to push back the migrants, according to human rights groups, while imposing a state of emergency over a 3-kilometre-wide stretch of land along the border.
The consequence is that migrants are bounced back and forth between the two sides, with many left to wander the forests in the area for days on end without access to food or shelter. At least 12 people are known to have died in the border area so far, including minors. The burial of one of them, a 19-year-old Syrian called Ahmed al-Hasan, who was found drowned in the Bug river, took place on November 15 in the Polish village Bohoniki. The man’s family took part by phone.
Latest events show each side is hardening its position, which is unlikely to help the migrants’ immediate plight. On November 15, the EU approved new sanctions on the Belarusian regime, which the European External Action Service said would target “airlines, travel agents and everybody involved in this illegal push of migrants”.
And according to Grupa Granica, a coalition of NGOs and activists, information is coming in about attempts by the Belarusian police and military to force the migrants into using violence against the Polish side in order to provoke a major confrontation.
As a result, Grupa Granica is appealing to the Polish government to create a humanitarian corridor for the migrants trapped at the border. “We believe this is the only way to de-escalate the violence,” the group said in a statement.
Hostages of Lukashenko’s regime
On November 15, thousands of migrants who had gathered in front of the border crossing point at Kuznica Bialostocka made an unsuccessful attempt to enter Poland. Major global media outlets, allowed into the area by the Lukashenko regime, broadcasted the attempted crossing.
The following morning, after the group had slept overnight in the cold next to the crossing point, a woman appeared unconscious as she was taken away by fellow migrants towards an ambulance. Later in the morning of November 16, a group of migrants started attacking the fence, throwing stones and even reportedly a stun grenade, leading to the Polish side using water cannon to force them back.
That was just the latest and most serious incident in a series of attempts by migrants to cross the border en masse that have been taking place since November 8. That date marked a change of tactics by the Lukashenko regime – at the outset, it directed migrants to points all along the border in a mostly quiet operation; now it is gathering migrants into large groups to create more visually dramatic footage for the global media to air.
Minsk’s hand in the crisis was always tacitly accepted, both when it came to bringing the migrants to Belarus and in later channelling them across the border. Mohammed, an Iraqi migrant interviewed this week by BIRN in a refugee centre in Bialystok, said the Belarusian authorities were the ones to cut the barbed wire border fence for his group to pass through in early October. Boushra, a Syrian woman who has since made it to The Netherlands, also interviewed by BIRN this month, described in detail how the Belarusian authorities collected the migrants who had failed to get into Poland and gathered them in camps in order to later drive them in vehicles to other locations on the border to try again.
But now, with the gathering of migrants into larger groups, the interventions by the Belarusian authorities can be explicitly seen in footage posted online.
Since November 8, when the first mass attempt to cross into Poland occurred, videos posted by the migrants themselves as well as the Polish Border Guard show the Belarusian police and military gathering migrants into sizeable groups, both north and south of Kuznica, to force their way over the border. During the night of November 14, for example, the Polish Border Guard said the Belarusian authorities used green laser pointers to blind the Polish soldiers while herding the migrants across the border around the locality of Czeremcha, south of Kuznica.
Migrants on the Belarusian side corroborate these claims. According to multiple accounts given by text or phone to Polish journalists, the migrants claim the Belarusian armed forces are putting pressure on them to storm the border, either by threatening them or by denying them food and water. There are also indications that some of the migrants might be trying to resist carrying out such directions, despite the risks inherent in that.
Grupa Granica, the coalition of NGOs, predicts that Belarus will continue to ratchet up pressure at the border using similar tactics over the coming weeks, especially given the EU’s decision to impose new sanctions on the Belarusian regime on November 15 and a parliamentary assembly of the Union State of Belarus and Russia that is scheduled for December 2.
“We have been receiving more and more disturbing information about attempts to force the migrants to take part in Belarusian provocation and to use violence against Polish officers,” Grupa Granica wrote in a statement November 14. “Due to the risk of escalation of violence we want to remind all parties that migrants are not aggressors but hostages of Lukashenko’s regime.”
Escalating risk
“This is an escalation, it needs to be stressed,” Marek Swierczynski, a military and security expert from the Warsaw-based think tank Polityka Insight, tells BIRN. “It’s both the scale of this and the very clear presence of Belarusian security forces. We don’t yet have clarity over whether it’s military or internal security forces, but for sure there are uniformed armed people assisting and supplying the migrants, massing them and directing them.”
When BIRN travelled to the Polish border region in mid-November, the mood had changed dramatically from a few months earlier. The Polish army has built several military bases along the border. Soldiers are a routine sight in many of the towns and villages along the state of emergency zone – it’s common to simply meet them shopping at the local grocery store. Armed contingents of either police, army or border guards routinely stop and check cars driving near the edges of the emergency zone.
On November 14, at a crossing point in Czeremcha, near the emergency zone, the Polish police demanded the International Mobile Equipment Identity, or IMEI, number of this reporter’s phone and those of the accompanying photographer and translator. The IMEI is a unique identifier for a mobile phone that enables it to be tracked.
At the same time, Poland has taken steps to seal its border with Belarus – a process largely endorsed by the EU. Poland has built a barbed wire fence along the border, which until recently had mostly been unmarked. About 20,000 troops are currently deployed at the border and Warsaw says it wants to build a wall modelled on the Greek-Turkish one. In late October, the Polish government announced plans to expand and mobilise its military, including tripling the number of soldiers, to reach 250,000 professional staff and 50,000 volunteer troops (compared with the 100,000 or so today).
Human rights groups have condemned the militarisation of the situation, and the expert Swierczynski says it may not even make sense from a security point of view.
“We are relying on the military and uniformed forces of the Ministry of Interior, but this does not demonstrate strength; rather it demonstrates weakness,” Swierczynski argues. “If you reach for the solutions of last resort – the soldiers on the ground now are from high-readiness combat units – what will you do at the next stage of escalation?”
“How will you handle an armed escalation if it happens? And we can’t rule out that this is the goal of the other side,” the expert explains.
For the moment, Swierczynski says, the Polish government is relying exclusively on ‘hard’ measures, while ignoring the ‘soft’ ones: “Ultimately, there needs to be a more complex solution, including the humanitarian aspect, perhaps a multilateral agreement with Belarus, including source countries and under the international umbrella.”
“But we are quite far from that,” he concludes.