Updated:
The humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border continues. On Saturday night, a hundred refugees are said to have tried to get to Poland. The news ticker.
- There is no sign of a solution to the humanitarian crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border.
- On Saturday shortly before midnight, around a hundred refugees are said to have made a fruitless attempt to cross the border (see first report).
- Poland offers to finance the repatriation of the refugees (see update from November 21, 3:10 p.m.).
- This news ticker is continuously updated.
Update from November 21, 3:06 p.m.: The Polish government offers the refugees to pay to travel home. The German press agency reported on Sunday. According to the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki: “We are in a position at any moment to finance the return of migrants to their countries of origin, we have also developed a lot of diplomatic activities in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East.”
From his point of view, it is not an “ordinary migration crisis”, but a deliberately triggered destabilization of Europe. Poland’s Prime Minister met with the heads of government of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. His Lithuanian counterpart Ingrida Simonyte said after meeting Morawiecki on Sunday that Poland was bearing the greatest burden of a hybrid attack on the EU’s eastern border.
A hybrid attack is what experts call a kind of hybrid form between war and peace that uses military and non-military means openly and covertly. From the point of view of security researcher Lukasz Olejink, “hybrid war” is a rather vague term. The conflict between Belarus and Poland has meanwhile caused border tension, with around 12,000 soldiers stationed near the border on the Polish side. Belarusian security forces and soldiers are already near the border, the expert said.
In the meantime, the World Health Organization (WHO) is sounding the alarm that disease is threatened to spread in one of the emergency shelters in Belarus. Around 2000 people are housed there in a very confined space.
100 refugees tried to cross the border on Saturday night
First report: Czeremsza, Poland / Belarus – On Saturday shortly before midnight, around a hundred refugees are said to have tried to cross the border between Belarus and Poland near the Polish town of Czeremsza – without success. That emerges from a report by the German Press Agency. According to the Polish border guards, they were said to have received support from Belarusian security forces. These are said to have brought the refugees to the border in a truck and then placed a kind of wooden walkway on the barbed wire that protects the border. The Polish border guards were allegedly thrown with branches and stones, and the Belarusian forces are said to have blinded them with laser beams. Polish security forces said there were a total of 208 attempts to cross the border. Poland refuses to let journalists into the area, so an independent verification of the information is not possible at this time.
Background: Lukashenko is supposed to use refugees as leverage against the EU
The refugees, who are currently in the border area of Poland and Belarus, come from Afghanistan, Syria and the autonomous Kurdish regions in northern Iraq, among others, and sometimes persist in freezing temperatures at night. They report torture and beatings, around a dozen are said to have died in a forest and swamp area along the Polish-Belarusian border. Poland accuses Belarus of having changed tactics and now directing smaller groups to several places on the border.
The EU blames Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko for wanting to use the refugees as leverage. He wanted to put pressure on the West, so the allegation. The refugees are said to have entered Belarus on tourist visas and are to receive support from the Belarusian forces on site – as reported by the Polish border guards. The Spanish newspaper El País speaks of the Belarusian dictator Lukashenko using the refugees as “weapons of war” and calls the situation at the border a humanitarian crisis. The border is degenerating into a pure defense machine. “What is the difference between us and Belarus, which uses the corpses of refugees as instruments of war? With this rampant logic of dehumanization, democracies are dying, ”the newspaper continues to comment on the crisis at the border.
#Belarus #conflict #Poland #pay #return #journey #refugees #illnesses #emergency #shelters #problem