Poland Construction began on Tuesday of a new border wall with Belarus to block the arrival of illegal migrants, following the crisis between Warsaw and Minsk last year.
(Read here: UN: migrants denounce that Belarus forced them to cross into Poland)
“The work has been delivered this Tuesday to the person who will carry it out,” a spokeswoman for the border guards, Captain Krystyna Jakimik-Jarosz, told AFP. The person in charge did not detail where this wall is being built.
(Also: The journey of Cubans in the migrant crisis of Belarus and Poland)
“It is what the Belarusian services want to send groups of migrants, so for security reasons we do not report the precise location,” he added.
At 186 km long, about half of the border’s total length of 418 km, the 5.5-meter-high metal barrier will cost some 353 million euros ($407 million) and is due for completion in June.
“The provisional (wire) fence has helped us a lot because while a group of migrants was preparing to make their way, we had time to move staff to stop them,” added Jakimik-Jarosz. But this project raises concern among human rights defenders and environmental activists.
(In context: What happens at the border between Belarus and Poland?)
The former fear that migrants fleeing conflict situations will not be able to submit asylum claims, and the latter believe that it will have dire effects on the fauna and flora of the forests of this border area.
“We will do everything to minimize environmental damage,” the spokeswoman guaranteed. The European Union (EU) threw its support behind Poland and strongly criticized Belarus.
For its part, the Polish government rejected Brussels’ proposal for the European agency Frontex to participate in border surveillance. And he passed a law that allows illegal migrants to be expelled without waiting for them to present their asylum application.
Special area and barriers with wire fences
Thousands of migrants, coming from the Middle East, mainly from Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, Lebanon and Afghanistan, tried last year to cross the Polish border to enter EU territory. Some of them managed to pass and continued their journey.
Poland and Western countries accused the Belarusian regime of encouraging, even orchestrating and aiding this flow of migrants by promising them easy access to the EU.
The government of the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, rejected these accusations and reproached Poland for its inhumane treatment of migrants.
At the height of the crisis, Poland created a special border zone closed to NGOs and the press, built barbed-wire barriers and sent in thousands of soldiers. The security forces were ordered to expel the migrants to Belarusian territory.
These measures, added to the death by cold and hunger of a dozen migrants in the Polish forests, provoked a heated debate in Poland between those in favor of defending the national border, which is also one of the limits of the EU, and human rights defenders.
They demand that migrants have the option to apply for asylum and that they not be expelled while the application is being examined. The border guard said Tuesday that they had registered 17 illegal entries in the last 24 hours.
A group of 14 people – 11 Iranians, two Lebanese and one Syrian – “cut through the barbed wire fence and entered Poland,” they said on Twitter. Another group, including three people from Ghana, was detained at another point on the border.
AFP
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