Three months ago, hotels in Bialowieza, in northeastern Poland and four kilometers from the border with Belarus, were packed with tourists. With the school holidays, it was high season in this town, the main entry point to one of the last primordial forests on the continent, which is home to the largest population of European bison in the world and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today, the two largest complexes, Zubrowka and Bialowieski, almost look like military camps: they only house members of the security forces and have troop trucks parked outside.
Between those two scenes is September 2, when Poland decreed a state of emergency in an area along the 400-kilometer border with Belarus that encompasses about 200 towns, including Bialowieza. Access was prohibited to all non-resident civilians, including journalists and independent observers. Also disseminate photographs of the situation. “From that day on, it was emptied,” says one of its inhabitants, who wants to preserve anonymity. The goose that lays the golden eggs of tourism, the town’s main source of income, stopped laying them.
“Most likely there are more soldiers, police and border guards in Bialowieza today than there are inhabitants. [unos 2.000]”, Says this tourist guide in a house in the town of Hajnowka, outside the area forbidden to journalists. For her, the worst thing is not the blow that her pocket has suffered with the collapse of the sector in which she works, but the “enormous emotional cost” that the new situation generates. On the one hand, there is the new landscape of helicopters flying overhead and long guns in the streets. “You walk, or you are driving, down a street and you see a group of soldiers with all the equipment and you think: ‘This is new for me,” he says. On the other, the sadness for the stories shared among neighbors about the refugees or migrants they have encountered, even within the hypermilitarized Bialowieza itself. “A friend found a man so tired and desperate that he was just sitting on the side of the road. I would tell him ‘Please take me to the border guards’, without really understanding what it would entail, “he says.
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She also ran into a migrant family just moments before they were captured by security forces. “They had two very young children. The father and one of them were barefoot. We gave them water, our baby’s booties and a baby food. Some of the guards were also removed. After you see something like that, you come home, you see your baby playing and you think, ‘fuck, there are kids in that forest who should be safe and playing too.’ You can not forget it. And that for me is the greatest drama ”.
Near the border, the mobile vibrates. It is a text message from the national government addressed to people trying to enter illegally: “The Polish border is closed. The Belarusian authorities lied to you. Come back to Minsk! Don’t take any pills from Belarusian soldiers. “
The vetoed strip is about three kilometers wide, but it is not marked with a square and bevel. Rather, it is a zigzagging line of police checkpoints on the roads – and to get in and out of towns – with a constant flow of military vehicles. The mist and the beauty of the bare trees on both sides of the road give the landscape a certain air of unreality. Also the line of police cars parked in Teremiski, one of the three settlements created in line to exploit the forest industry of the forest and whose inhabitants were exempted from servitude. Or the sculpture in a roundabout, which —as frozen in time— celebrates a project with neighboring Belarus and Ukraine.
Traffic jams at controls (sometimes limited to a simple glance and other times involving several questions and opening the trunk), the impossibility of inviting friends from outside the area to the house, rethinking each publication on social networks … The banned area It is the one that has been affected the most by their day-to-day lives, but it is not very different in the nearby towns and abroad.
The increase in the last week of the tension between Poland and Belarus on the occasion of the new migratory route opened by the Aleksandr Lukashenko regime has undone vacation plans. It’s a bridge (on Thursday Poland celebrated its national holiday), but in the parking lot of the only access to the park that remains open, outside the forbidden zone, you can hardly see a handful of cars, two of them police. Only one stall – with bison stuffed animals, postcards, and fridge magnets – keeps the guy. Near the Orzeszkowo train station, a yellow and silver thermal blanket thrown in the bushes reminds that a migrant probably slept there.
One word quickly appears in conversations with locals: fear. For different reasons. Marciej, 29, just bought a knife. He did so after a friend told him that he found one in the Bialowieza Forest, a place of passage for migrants and refugees to the interior of Europe. With the salary he earns as an employee of a furniture factory, he has also gifted a can of pepper spray to a girl he is trying to seduce. “She lives alone, goes out at night … I’m afraid that some refugee will do something to her,” she says in front of a supermarket in Hajnowka. “I understand why they have reached the border, but I am not happy that they are here. I prepare for the worst. I know their culture from what I have read on the internet and they say that it is a religion of peace, but it is not like that ”, he says in reference to Islam, which the majority profess.
Beside him and leaning on a bicycle, Marcin Dabrowski, 40, is more concerned about the possibility of a war breaking out. “Lukashenko and [el presidente ruso, Vladímir] Putin are crazy, ”he says in reference to the Kremlin’s support for the Belarusian leader. Opposite, a group of policemen smoke outside the Wrota Lasu hotel, where they occupy almost every room, and the meaning of the name (“The Forest Gate”) and the bison decoration is almost ironic these days. Dabrowski points out to the officers: “Yes, there are a lot of military and police, but it makes me feel safe.”
Krzysiek, a 42-year-old mechanical appliance assembler, also fears above all that an isolated incident will trigger a war. “At the wrong time, a Belarusian soldier can shoot and it explodes. My only fear is that these [los bielorrusos] end up doing some provocation ”, he assures. Her mother-in-law, on the other hand, who lives alone three kilometers from the border in a village where the streetlights are turned off at night, is scared by the idea that a migrant will force entry into her house, she says.
The memorials that punctuate the area recall its atrocious past. “In memory of the inhabitants of Narewka, victims of Nazi fascism,” reads a monolith – with the Orthodox and Catholic crosses and the Star of David – surrounded by bouquets of flowers.
Near the town of Budy, four friends drink liquor in a food house decorated with cycling motifs (the owner claims that he participated in a Tour de France in the 1970s).
– “Are you from Iraq?” They laugh when they see two foreigners enter. “No, it’s fine … But if you are Russian, bad.”
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