Hundreds of refugees in Belarus have given up hope of getting into the EU. According to the spokeswoman for the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko, 374 people, mostly Iraqis, accepted an offer from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry to fly from Minsk to the Kurdish city of Erbil or on to Baghdad on Thursday. A Boeing 747 took off from Minsk on Thursday afternoon. Another return flight is scheduled for this Friday.
However, there is no talk of relaxation at the borders with Lithuania and Poland. People are still trying to get into the EU. In view of the situation of the people, the International Red Cross speaks of a “humanitarian tragedy” and demands access for aid organizations. At least ten people have died, including a 14-year-old boy from hypothermia and probably a one-year-old baby. The situation will worsen in view of the approaching winter. The President of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, expressed his shock. It was “heartbreaking to see a child die in the cold on the threshold of the EU,” wrote the 65-year-old on Twitter. “The exploitation of migrants and asylum seekers has to stop, the inhumanity has to stop”, Sassoli continued.
Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, meanwhile, praised the Polish government’s approach to the EU’s external border. At his meeting with Poland’s Interior Minister Mariusz Kamiński in Warsaw, he said: “What Poland is doing in the migrant crisis is right … what Poland is doing here on the external border serves the entire EU and, above all, Germany.” Seehofer thanked his colleague for his “clear course” and described his visit as a “gesture of solidarity with Poland”.
Seehofer denied that Chancellor Angela Merkel had agreed in an interview with Lukashenko that Germany would accept 2,000 migrants. “What we’re not going to do is take in refugees.” Because that would mean that Lukashenko’s “perfidious strategy” would work. But he pleaded for the people in the border area in Belarus to be helped by the UN Refugee Agency, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the EU Commission. The aim, however, is “to return people to their countries of origin”. The news of the take-off of the plane that brought refugees from Minsk back to Iraq is “good news”.
Lukashenko’s spokeswoman Natalia Eismant says there are a total of 7,000 migrants in Belarus, around 2,000 are at the border. Belarusian units brought migrants from the border town of Kuźnica to an emergency shelter in a warehouse in a nearby logistics center. Lukashenko suggested to Chancellor Angela Merkel in her first phone call that the EU should create a “humanitarian corridor for 2,000 refugees,” said Eismant. “After the agreement reached, Angela Merkel will hold talks with the EU.” Belarus, for its part, will return the remaining 5,000 refugees to their home countries “as far as they wish”. But many migrants refused to return.
A Syrian woman tells doctors about her baby who died in the forest
The Polish border guard reported three further attempts to cross the border into the EU on Tuesday night. The largest group was around 500 people. 200 of them initially managed to cross, but they were then arrested by the Polish border guards. According to international law, Poland is obliged to enable people who illegally cross the border to apply for asylum. In fact, the migrants are being sent back to Belarusian territory.
People who manage to cross the border illegally are apparently still being picked up by smugglers. In the Suwalszczyzna region near Lithuania, the Polish police reported that they had stopped a Renault that night in which 21 Syrians and one Yemeni tried to move on.
The Polish doctor group PCPM reported on a dramatic operation on Thursday night: In a wooded area they found three people who, according to them, had been there for six weeks. Among them a Syrian woman who cried and told about her one year old child who died in the forest. The Polish information service Onet and the Belarusian journalist Tadeusz Giczan reported on the death of 19-year-old Syrian Ahmad Al Hasan, who drowned in the border river Bug and was buried by a Muslim community in the village of Bohoniki. Al Hasan fled the city of Homs before the Syrian civil war in 2014 and has since been in a refugee camp in Jordan.
Polish politicians criticized Merkel’s phone calls with ruler Alexander Lukashenko. Ryszard Terlecki, parliamentary group leader of the ruling PiS party, said in the tabloid Super expressthat “European solidarity has been violated”. Lukashenko achieved one of his most important goals: “He became a participant in talks and was accepted as the head of the Belarusian state.”