One can hardly imagine the misery of the refugees at the border between Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. Thousands of people from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, many of them Kurds and Yazidis, are camping in the woods in freezing temperatures with little supplies and no medical care. And they all have only one goal – they want to enter the EU, with most of them wanting to reach Germany.
They all have been lured by the dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. The Belarussian national airline Belavia, along with Turkish Airlines, allegedly chartered flights and brought the people to the Belarussian capital Minsk. From there they were taken by bus to the border with Poland and Lithuania. A few hundred managed to cross the green border at first, then to Germany.
The Polish army then built a tight cordon along the 400 km long border with barbed wire and soldiers. The migrants were subsequently turned back with water cannons, tear gas and batons. Despite not possessing the legal right to cross into the Schengen Zone, the migrants then attacked the Polish border guards with stones and whatever else they could use.
The Polish authorities do not allow journalists to reach the border and have sealed off a three-kilometre-wide strip as a prohibited zone. This has made direct reports from the border rare. A correspondent from Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Ivo Mijnssen, was in the area of the border zone and reported: “The misery is indescribable. I was in the forests with a delegation of doctors. We found a woman with 5 children who had a body temperature of only 25 degrees and took her to a hospital. She could be saved for the time being.”
Polish military vehicles usually take such migrants back to the border with Belarus soon after initial treatment. Requests for asylum are not accepted.
Belarus’ dictator is deliberately using migrants to blackmail the EU
Lukashenko’s actions are part of his reaction to sanctions that were imposed by the EU after last year’s rigged presidential election. These were tightened again after a state-sponsored hijacking of a passenger plane last spring. Lukashenko ordered the Belarussian Air Force to intercept and force a Ryanair flight flying from Athens to Vilnius to land in order to arrest an opposition member that was on board the flight.
Lukashenko has upped the stakes in his ongoing war with the West by trying to force thousands of illegal migrants to cross Poland’s – and the EU’s – borders. Furthermore, he deliberately chose the timing, as Germany has yet to form a new government after their federal elections in October.
Sadly, the EU also acted in a rather clueless and uncoordinated manner, and has done so since the beginning of the crisis. Poland’s right-wing government is itself in conflict with Brussels over political interference in the Polish judiciary. Just prior to the outbreak of the migrant crisis, the EU’s highest court imposed a €1 million daily fine on Warsaw in an attempt to persuade the Poles to abolish its new disciplinary chamber.
Poland’s government has refused to let officials from the EU border protection agency Frontex – which is based in Warsaw – to the border and has rejected offers of help from other countries.
According to Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Germany, in particular, should have a special interest in protecting the EU’s external border. Morawiecki demanded that the new German government immediately stop the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea gas pipeline as part of a response to the hybrid war that is being carried out against Europe.
“We are defending the EU border here in Poland. And when we talk about the bigger picture: Let’s work together for peace and not give Vladimir Putin extra money through energy payments so he can keep arming.”
The EU was reluctant to impose new, more severe, sanctions on Belarus. Reports have indicated that the new round embargoes would have included cutting the country off from international payments. Lukashenko, for his part, threatened to cut off a natural gas pipeline running through his country, which would limit the supply of Russian gas to Europe.
This time, however, Lukashenko’s patron in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, did not agree.
Outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke twice on the phone with Lukashenko this week. According to information from Minsk, a deal was negotiated: The EU would take in 2,000 refugees, and Lukashenko would repatriate the remainder, about 5,000 people, back to the Middle East. A first plane did indeed take over 400 of the migrants on November 18, all of which had agreed to be sent back to Iraq.
The European Commission has so far strictly rejected negotiations with Minsk. In the meantime, however, Lukashenko seems to be trying to de-escalate the situation: Apparently, he fears that several thousand migrants could remain in Belarus permanently. He may also be worried that control of the situation on the border with Poland and Lithuania could slip from his grasp. Or, in the worst-case scenario, he may want to set a new trap for the EU.
The EU should now quickly start talks with Lukashenko’s patrons in the Kremlin. Putin must fear that the conflict could postpone the completion and bringing on line of the new Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea to Germany.
Lukashenko, himself, now actually seems interested in da e-escalation. Near the border with Poland, an old warehouse has been converted to accommodate the migrants, who are now no longer allowed to approach the border strip. Lukashenko is perhaps now afraid that he will lose control of the border conflict that he artificially caused and that the migrants could stay in Belarus for a long time.
The fact that Putin has called on Lukashenko to enter into a dialogue with members of the opposition in Belarus is a good sign. The Belarussian opposition, which is supposed to meet for a conference in Vienna on November 22, has nothing against a representative of Russia taking part and acting as a mediator. As a precondition, however, political prisoners should be released and acts of violence stopped, according to a spokesman for the leader of the opposition, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Lukashenko, however, will only agree to this if more pressure is applied by the Kremlin.
To be sure, Moscow has so far done everything to weaken and divide the EU. The ill-fated visit by Europe Foreign Affairs chief, Josep Borrell, in March marked a low point in relations between Moscow and Brussels. At that meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov utterly embarrassed Borrell. Despite that, a dialogue between the EU and Russia must be restarted. This is the only way to prevent further provocations by Lukashenko and thus further, and even greater, human suffering. To that end, even a real war can no longer be excluded.
