Status: 11/19/2021 7:12 a.m.
Hundreds of migrants are said to have left a camp at the Bruzgi border crossing in Belarus. According to the border guards, they were taken to a warehouse. Meanwhile, Germany denied rumors of a hosting agreement with Belarus.
In Belarus, according to the border guards, hundreds of migrants have left a makeshift camp on the border with Poland. On Thursday, all refugees from the camp near the Bruzgi border crossing were brought “on a voluntary basis” to a nearby logistics center, said the Belarusian border guard on the Telegram messenger service.
The authorities also published photos of the apparently abandoned camp, in which around 2,000 people had been waiting for the past few days. On Tuesday evening, more than 1,000 people had already been brought from the camp to a huge warehouse. However, according to the Belarusian authorities, around 800 more slept in tents or around campfires in the open air at temperatures below 0 degrees.
These migrants have now also been brought to the warehouse because of “deteriorating weather conditions”, as the border guard announced. There they receive warm food and warm clothing. The refugees, including many Kurds from northern Iraq, had set up the camp in a forest area.
Allegedly there are still 7000 migrants in Belarus
The state media in Belarus reported that the makeshift camps along the border with Poland had been completely cleared. However, the Polish Ministry of Defense released a video allegedly showing hundreds of people and their tents near an official border crossing. At first it was unclear whether the countries were talking about two different locations with emergency camps in the border area.
Previously, a first return flight had brought 431 people back to Iraq, including many women and children. The Iraqi Airways plane took off from Minsk and landed on Thursday evening in Erbil, the capital of the northern Iraqi Kurdish region. According to the Belarusian authorities, there may still be up to 7,000 migrants in Belarus.
Germany denies hosting agreement
According to ambiguous statements by a spokeswoman for the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko, rumors spread that Germany was negotiating the transfer of thousands of migrants from the Polish border to the EU – or that it wanted to take them all in itself.
Accordingly, Lukashenko demanded that Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) should negotiate a “humanitarian corridor” for 2,000 migrants to the EU, the spokeswoman said. In return, Lukashenko offered on one of the two phone calls to the Chancellor to try to return 5,000 migrants to their home countries.
Seehofer: “message is wrong”
However, Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer made it clear on Thursday evening that the federal government had not reached an agreement with Belarus. “This report is wrong,” said Seehofer after a meeting with Poland’s Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski.
In response to the question from the EU Commission in the evening whether talks were being held at European level about the division of 2000 migrants: “The EU Commission is not aware that there are any discussions of this kind.”
200 migrants arrested
Thousands of refugees from the Middle East have been stuck on the EU’s external border with Belarus, especially on the border with Poland, for weeks. The EU accuses the Belarusian ruler Lukashenko of deliberately smuggling the refugees into the border area with the EU.
The situation on the border has recently been extremely tense. Poland has erected a border fence and pulled together more than 15,000 security guards. According to information from Warsaw, on Thursday night they arrested around 200 migrants who had tried to cross the border into Poland.