Migrants at the Polish border: “That was maybe the worst idea”

You can’t go back and forth: Migrants are still waiting in the border area between Poland and Belarus. Many of them apparently have relatives in the West who were hoping that a gate would open here.

He wants us to call him “Haval”; there had already been trouble with the authorities who suspected him of being a smuggler himself. The young man from the Kurdish part of Syria has lived in Vienna for twelve years since he wanted to desert from the army of the civil war country. He has not seen his parents since then, despite all attempts, including through the Red Cross. This year, however, a new opportunity seemed to open up. Expensive, Haval speaks of 16,000 to 20,000 euros, but still. Although he heard that there could be problems on the way in Poland, he had no idea which ones. The new route was on everyone’s lips in Syrian Kurdistan, everyone was talking about it, the media reported – “and my parents just thought, let’s try it. They asked a travel agency. It was perhaps the worst idea that they would go to Belarus came.”

Haval soon received the call that something had gone wrong; the mother is lying in the hospital with a broken leg. Haval, who works as a hairdresser in Vienna, leaves everything and breaks up; he believes she is in Hajnowka in eastern Poland and, as it is officially said, was released and brought back to the border, only poorly treated.

Together with an activist, Haval has since tried to keep in touch from a hotel in a nearby small town. Telephone calls indicate that his parents are part of a larger group that has already been pushed back and forth between the two countries on several occasions. The calls are short and the batteries are weak, reports Haval. His parents are now on the Belarusian side “like a bank” that has to give out money for everything: “If you want to breathe, you have to pay. If you want to charge your cell phone 50 percent, you have to pay 50 dollars.”

Hope remains

Haval wants to hold out, hopes to somehow get his parents out, but the chances are slim. Poland doesn’t let anyone near the border; and Belarus does not issue him a visa either. Haval is probably not an isolated case: time and again, among the migrants who get caught in the border area between the fronts, relatives of immigrants who already live in the west are. The Federal Police confirms: Among the smugglers caught organizing the onward journey to Germany, there are often migrants residing in the West: members of criminal human traffickers, but also desperate relatives.

There is seldom a happy ending, but it does happen occasionally. Katarzyna Zdanowciz, border guard spokeswoman in Bialystok, north-east Poland, describes the case of a woman who was with other migrants in a swampy area. She was in very poor condition and was taken to the hospital. With the help of her husband, who lives in Germany, it was possible to identify the woman. “Now the matter has been settled for the benefit of the foreigners, because they were Syrians and the process then looks different – there is war in Syria.”

So it is quite possible that Haval could have turned the tide if he had got to the hospital in time. But this is not how his mother is on record in Poland. Human rights activists suspect the country of not even documenting people who are returned to Belarus without a trial. Is Haval now reproaching himself for agreeing to the illegal travel plan that could cost his parents their lives? No, he says, if you haven’t seen your family for twelve years, you can’t think negatively or be pessimistic. He only thought of the good things, of seeing mother and father again soon, of the things he wanted to do for them afterwards.