The crisis situation on the Polish-Belarusian border seems – for the time being – to have calmed down. After the Polish border guard and army rounded up thousands of migrants in the autumn and pushed them back to Belarus, now only small groups of people are intercepted braving the winter weather. Last week a party from India and men from five different African countries trying to reach the EU on a raft.
The flow of migrants to Belarus has been curbed and those still in the border area are no longer being hunted down en masse by Alexander Lukashenko’s regime. However, aid workers and foreign journalists on the Polish side are still prohibited from engaging within a few kilometers of the European external border to go. However, there is now an opportunity to hear from a border guard what she and her colleagues have experienced. And why she thinks the international fuss about pushbacks is unjustified.
Izabela Greczan (40) has been working at the ‘extremely quiet’ border post near Czeremcha since 2004. In the early years to check passports and today, as a lieutenant with three stars on her shoulders, behind a desk. Cigarette smuggling was the main problem. But for the past six months, she has patrolled the forests with 2,000 border guards “to make sure no one crosses the EU border illegally” and runs services at a registration center for asylum seekers. “We are pretended to kill children here, but we help families by giving them our own children’s clothes and toys.”
Greczan himself has not witnessed people squeezing through the barbed wire fence at the border. She did not encounter any of the nine migrants who died, nor has she been subjected to violence. But she has met the exhausted asylum seekers, experienced confrontations with Belarusian border guards and seen the scratches and nicks in her beleaguered colleagues. “The stones that were thrown at us are not the kind you find in the forest, but the bricks that you build a wall out of,” she says. And she feared deadlier weapons. “It was very dangerous to be at the border, especially at night. Everyone was afraid that we would be shot at, especially since the Belarusian soldiers were involved in the violence.”
Pushbacks confirmed
After the EU confronted Belarusian dictator Lukashenko with new sanctions in May, he imported migrants from the Middle East and elsewhere and drove them towards Lithuania and Poland. Tensions reached a boiling point in November when Belarusian border police herded people and helped storm the border. Kurdish migrants in particular try to make their way to Europe with bricks, branches, laser pistols and metal scissors. The propaganda images of both the Belarusian and Polish authorities about this fabricated migration crisis or “hybrid attack” went around the world.
Poland is unable to keep the border consisting of forest and swamp tight – almost twelve thousand migrants have now reached Germany via Minsk. But the country offers strong resistance, which, according to supporters of a strict migration policy, is exemplary and which human rights organizations call a disgrace. The main point of contention: the pushbacks, who violate international law. Migrants caught inside Poland would be unceremoniously pushed back across the Belarusian border.
How pushing back migrants across Europe’s external border became practice
Border Guard Greczan confirms that she and her colleagues are directing border-crossers to return, but denies that this is done illegally. “Anyone who wants to stay in Poland – who applies for asylum here – is received.” According to her, it is the migrants themselves who refrain from doing so. „We have interpreters and we ask them: ‘Are you looking for protection in Poland?’ Most then say: ‘No, we want to go to Germany, we don’t want to stay in Poland.’ Then they have to go back over the border they crossed illegally.” Just like it happens when someone arrives at Warsaw airport without the proper papers. „We adhere to the rules of [de ‘grensvrije’ Europese zone] Schengen by protecting the external border.”
Almost all asylum seekers’ centers in Poland are closed, which means that people cannot travel on to another country during or after their asylum procedure. It would therefore be more attractive for some migrants to make a new attempt from Belarus to get past the Polish border police and the army unseen.
Greczan claims that all migrants she and her colleagues find will be identified and that they will be given food and possibly medical care and clothing before they are given a formal decision and they are deported. It doesn’t affect her that she also sends young children back into the icy wilderness in this way, she says. “I am a mother myself and I would not put my children in this situation. It is the choice of their parents. They know that it is illegal to cross the border. Or they should know.”
I am a mother myself and I would not put my children in this situation.
Izabela Grezcan Border Guard in Poland
Marta Górczynska, human rights lawyer for the Helsinki Committee, says that many refugees and migrants have no idea about their rights and possibilities and the Polish authorities do not tell them. “The border guards are avoiding their responsibilities.” Activists also say they have spoken to migrants who have been pushed back despite pleas to stay in Poland. And that this deliberately does not happen at border posts where the Belarusian troops could receive them. Since they refuse, the migrants are dumped in the middle of the forest over the border. At least 17 people, including children, are said to have died on both sides of the border.
Greczan’s lack of compassion has to do with her own experience at the border. “Children also attack us with stones. Those people don’t care if they kill us with their aggression.” Migrants have testified that they are being coerced into violence by Belarusian border guards. The Polish government says they are being misused as ‘living weapons’.
Expensive visas
Although there are actual refugees among them, for example from Syria and Afghanistan, it seems clear that most of the migrants flown in by Lukashenko are not entitled to asylum in the EU. However, that does not deprive them of the right to non-refoulement: the principle that people should not be sent back to an unsafe country or situation. The question is whether the oppressive dictatorship in Belarus is risky for the group invited there. According to lawyer Górczynska, certainly. “The primeval forest itself is already dangerous, but certainly with the current temperatures. In addition, we have evidence that people have been mistreated in Belarus.”
But Greczan reasons that migrants in Belarus are safe. “We know that they get water, food and sleeping bags from the Belarusian authorities. We can see with our drones that they are being transported there by trucks to reception locations. They don’t have to sleep in the woods.” In addition, the migrants received (expensive) visas from the regime in Minsk, which has now also arranged flights back to Iraq, in particular. “They are legal there, not here.”
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