Status: 11/12/2021 8:10 a.m.
For days and nights, thousands of migrants have been waiting in the cold in Belarus on the EU border with Poland with almost no supplies. For the first time, refugee workers were allowed to visit them – and are now warning of deaths.
The migrants who have been staying in the cold in Belarus for days on the EU border with Poland can hope for support from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). Representatives of several aid organizations, including the International Organization for Migration (IOM), had visited the refugees in the tent camps on the Belarusian-Polish border, said the border guard in Minsk. According to the Belarusian authorities, around 2,000 people remain there, including many women and children who urgently need help. The UNHCR confirmed that representatives of aid organizations had visited the stranded people.
The EU, Belarus and its neighbor Russia speak of a “humanitarian catastrophe”. It must now be a matter of preventing deaths and accommodating people in safe places in Belarus, it said in a UNHCR statement. Ruler Alexander Lukashenko, who is held internationally responsible for the situation, had previously announced that pregnant women and children would be placed in sanatoriums.
The EU accuses Lukashenko of actively smuggling people, flying in migrants and having them escorted to the EU border by security forces. In addition to Poland, Lithuania is also affected. The ruler in Minsk had said that people could legally enter Belarus and then travel on and look for a better life in the EU. Many of the stranded are Kurds.
Lukashenko blames smugglers for the situation
According to Lukashenko, many migrants want to go to Germany. He himself had already advertised in the summer that “cozy” Germany needed workers. At the same time, he made it clear that he was not stopping anyone. Lukashenko was reacting to the EU’s sanctions against Belarus after a large number of violations of international law. However, he rejected responsibility for the escalation in the border region and blamed international smuggling networks for the situation.
The United Nations Relief Organization thanked the authorities in Belarus for access to the migrants. “We are ready to help find solutions,” said the press release. The Belarusian border guard, in turn, welcomed the fact that the representatives of the aid organizations had made their own picture for the first time. This is an important prerequisite for finding a solution that benefits people based on international experience.
The migrants themselves had asked the aid organizations to help them get asylum in the EU, said the border guard. “The weather, the lack of food and water are a threat to the physical condition of the people who seek refuge in EU countries.”
Emergency meeting in the UN Security Council
The US and several European countries condemned the government’s actions in Minsk. In a joint statement, they accused Belarus of “orchestrating the instrumentalization of people” at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. The aim of the ruler Alexander Lukashenko’s action is to “destabilize the external border of the European Union”.
Belarus also aims to “destabilize neighboring countries” and “divert attention from its own growing human rights violations,” said the joint statement by the US, France, Estonia, Ireland, the UK and Norway. Lukashenko’s strategy is “unacceptable” and must result in a “strong international reaction”.
Russia’s UN Deputy Ambassador, Dmitri Polyansky, told reporters before the Council meeting that he believed that his Western Council colleagues had a kind of “masochistic tendency” because it was very courageous to raise this issue, which was a total disgrace for the EU, before addressing Russia. He added that not all issues need to be addressed by the Security Council.
Chancellor Angela Merkel had already phoned Russian President Vladimir Putin twice about the crisis and asked him to intervene because of his influence on his Belarusian colleague Lukashenko. Putin, for his part, asked the Chancellor that the EU should talk to Belarus about the migrant crisis, the Kremlin announced in Moscow.
Seehofer: Poles are doing an important job
The incumbent Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer called for solidarity against Lukashenko. “The Poles are doing an important service here for all of Europe,” Seehofer told the newspapers of the “Funke Mediengruppe”. Therefore, the Polish government must be helped to secure the external border, and all EU states must stand together.
“We now have to rely on the entire democratic world public supporting our politics,” said the CSU politician. Lukashenko’s approach of taking migrants from the Middle East to Belarus and then on to the Polish border by scheduled flight is a “very nasty political method” that must be stopped. “We call this a hybrid threat, where people are used to destabilize the EU and especially Germany – this must not prevail in the world.”
However, Poland is also criticized for being excessively harsh on migrants and for not letting journalists into the region. The Polish parliament had expressly approved the practice of so-called pushbacks, which was rejected at EU level. Migrants who manage to break through the barbed wire fence from the Belarusian side are forcibly sent back.