Consider This from NPR - How A Dictator Engineered A Migration Crisis At The Belarus-Poland Border
Episode Date: November 18, 2021Migrants from faraway countries are stuck in Belarus, just across its border with Poland. They've traveled there to seek asylum in the EU. But Poland has refused to accept them. How did they get there...? They were invited — and in some cases, their travel facilitated — by the regime of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. EU leaders say Lukashenko and his backers in Russia are 'weaponizing' migration in retaliation for sanctions placed on Belarus last year. Those sanctions came after the EU accused Lukashenko of rigging his most recent election. Now, many hundreds of migrants are stuck on the Belarus side of the border. There have been at least nine recorded deaths, but observers think there have been many more. Migrants were reportedly moved from makeshift camps outdoors to a government-run shelter on Thursday, though it's unclear what Belarus plans to do with them next. NPR international correspondent Rob Schmitz has seen the crisis up close. This episode is a collection of his reporting. Find more of it here, and see photos from the border on NPR's Picture Show. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at considerthis@npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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What you're about to hear was recorded about a month ago in the Polish town of Sikulka,
on the country's eastern border with Belarus.
That is where NPR international correspondent Rob Schmitz met two men,
both migrants, who said they had barely had anything to eat for 10 days.
One of the men, Daniel Machado Puyol, said they had been drinking water from a river,
eating raw corn from nearby fields.
They were starving.
And you'll notice, he was speaking to Rob Schmitz in Spanish.
In Belarus?
From Havana, Moscow.
No, Havana, Moscow, Moscow, Belarus.
Belarus.
The men were from Cuba.
They got to Belarus after flying to Moscow,
and in recent months, thousands of other migrants from faraway countries have wound up there too.
Some of them are Iraqi, some of them are Kurds.
There are people from Yemen, from Syria.
There are people from African countries like Nigeria, Cameroon.
And from Cuba, as we just heard.
That is Kalina Zvornag.
She works for the humanitarian organization Fundacja Ossolania.
So why were migrants from as far away as Cuba starving in the forests of Belarus?
They are inviting them to Belarus, saying that they can cross EU border from there.
That's right. The Belarusian government, led by dictator Alexander Lukashenko,
is accused of inviting migrants to his country, helping arrange flights and encouraging them,
even forcing them, to illegally cross the border into Poland and into the European Union.
12,000 Polish troops have been deployed along the razor wire fence of the border.
Poland, though bound by EU law to process migrants seeking asylum,
refused to do so.
And Belarus has refused to take them back.
The European Commission president accused Belarus of state-sponsored people smuggling.
Now Belarus has reportedly moved many hundreds of migrants
out of their makeshift camps on the border to a government shelter nearby, where their fate is uncertain.
They appear still to be under the control of the country's security forces.
Machado Puyol said last month they had been beaten, refused food and water.
There are no human rights in Belarus, he said. We're humans, not animals.
Consider this. The migrants in Belarus are being used like pawns on a chessboard
by the Belarusian regime and its backers in Russia. Coming up, our correspondent Rob Schmitz,
who has seen the crisis up close.
From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Thursday, November 18th.
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Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange
rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's
apply. It's Consider This from NPR. It's not just that Belarus invited migrants to its border with
Poland. It helped them get there. This migration crisis is becoming more and more dangerous.
Vujicic Kunojcic, deputy director of the Center for Eastern Studies in
Warsaw. He told NPR that airlines, including Turkish Airlines and FlyDubai, have transported
migrants to Belarus, many of them landing in its capital, Minsk. They came from cities like
Istanbul, Dubai, Damascus, Beirut. Flight routes from those countries to Belarus did not even exist until the Belarusian
regime began handing out visas by the thousands to migrants who were promised a way to seek asylum
in the EU. Before the migration crisis, these airlines were quite recognized and respected.
But now they are taking part in a duty business. Without these airlines, there would be no illegal
migrants on the EU eastern border.
Now, there is recent evidence that those flights have slowed down after the EU threatened sanctions
against the airlines.
But thousands of migrants already made it to the border.
So why?
Why is Belarus doing this? This phenomenon we've been
witnessing recently is a kind of weaponization of migration. Marcin Pertrudacz is the deputy
foreign minister of Poland. He told NPR that Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko and his
financial backer, Russian President Vladimir Putin, have launched a hybrid attack on the
European Union. The backstory? After the EU accused Lukashenko of stealing his country's
last election, it placed economic sanctions on Belarus. Now, Poland says this migration crisis
is Lukashenko's payback, a plot to destabilize Europe, something both Russia and Belarus deny.
But at the same time, Russia is not exactly hiding
its involvement in the crisis. This past week, Russia's foreign minister said if the EU provided
financial assistance to Belarus, this whole migration crisis could go away.
In the meantime, desperate scenes like this one played out on the border in recent weeks.
A crowd of hundreds of migrants packed around a truck distributing food.
Mostly men pushed to the front, catching rations thrown into the air.
This humanitarian crisis may be manufactured by Belarus, but Poland has also contributed to it by refusing to process asylum seekers in violation of European Union law and the UN-Geneva Conventions,
to which the Polish deputy foreign minister responds.
If we allow more and more people to cross the border,
then Mr. Lukashenko, who's doing also business on that,
will invite even more of those people.
So what should we do?
And as for reports Thursday that migrants had been moved from outdoor
camps to a nearby government shelter. It's not entirely clear that this is something that has
been completed, but we're going to continue to monitor very closely. U.S. Special Envoy for
Belarus, Julie Fisher. She told me there were also reports a single plane of migrants had flown out
of the country Thursday.
But Fisher said it's hard to know what's happening without more access for humanitarian groups and international observers.
And in the meantime, the crisis is not over.
A crisis she confirmed, as far as the U.S. government is concerned, was created intentionally.
Is there any doubt in your mind that this is a manufactured crisis?
I'm sorry to say that no, there is no doubt in my mind that this is a fully manufactured crisis.
Much of what you've heard so far in this episode has come from the work of our international correspondent, Rob Schmitz. Rob has been on the border with Poland and Belarus.
He's also following the crisis closely from Berlin, where he's based.
And that's where we find him now.
Hey, Rob.
Hey, Mary Louise.
Go back to something we just heard the Polish deputy foreign minister say, the weaponization of mass migration.
Is that what is happening here?
Yeah, it is. And not only that, but Poland says
Belarusian President Lukashenko has turned human trafficking into a business. And there's evidence
that this is true. A Polish journalist that I met found a trove of documents left behind by a group
of migrants who were along the border. They were ripped up, they were wet. He shared those documents with us,
and they contained lists of travelers from Iraq, receipts of payments made to Belarusian travel
agencies for flights to Belarus on a state-owned airline, and receipts of stays at state-run
hotels. There are also signatures of Belarusian officials who made all of this happen.
And a note on Europe's response.
Poland, as we said, has been refusing to accept migrants.
Some EU countries are pushing to change the laws so that countries in a similar situation as Poland is in now would what?
Would have more freedom to turn away asylum seekers in future?
Well, just to give some background on this, Poland is supposed to be subject to EU laws
and the Geneva Conventions, which basically say that if a migrant is asking for political asylum
after they come into a country or cross a border, that they need to be held while judges decide on
whether that asylum process is just or not.
And instead, what we have are Polish border guards sending these migrants straight back to Belarus
without even listening to any pleas for political asylum.
So with Poland skipping all these steps, you sort of have this interesting geopolitical rift. But, you know, in countries across Europe, you also find this political rift among everyday people on the
ground, some who support humanitarian rights for migrants and some who oppose their entry into the
EU. And this is not a new conflict in Europe. But the crisis in Belarus has meant that more people
are talking about it. I was in Warsaw recently and spoke to people on the street about this crisis.
I met Camila Norik, who works as an accountant, and here's what she thinks.
They need help. It's cold. There are children between them. So I think just because they are
humans, they deserve to be treated well, like everybody. Despite the situation? Despite the
situation. Like really, whoever it is and whatever they did, they need to be taken care of.
And that's it. They don't deserve to be in the forest and then be pushed from one side to another.
So Mary Louise, that's in Warsaw, which is a big, you know, typically liberal European city.
But then you go to, you know, smaller, more conservative towns, like the border town of Sokolko, where I did the bulk of my reporting along the border, and you hear something a little different.
That's Waldemar and Bożena Wojszal, and they stand by their government's decision to send migrants back to Belarus.
They said Poland must stand up to a dictator like Lukaszenko, who is using these migrants as pawns.
What if we were to cross their border? Wouldn't they send us back and tell us to leave them alone?
Believe me, we live here and we know something about that. None of us would ever dare to cross that border and believe there would not be a punishment. If I crossed there, they'd probably cut my head off.
Okay, so strong and conflicting feelings that you were hearing there in Poland, Rob.
But what about the numbers?
This obviously is an awful situation for people who are at the border,
but we're talking, what, a few thousand people. I want to play you something that Jan Egland of the Norwegian Refugee Council told NPR this week.
Europe is a big place.
There are more people coming over the border from Afghanistan to Iran every day
than the accumulated number of people on the EU border of Poland.
Why is Europe working themselves up in a hysteria?
This is every day for many of poorer nations in the rest of the world.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I mean, sure, migration is a problem in many areas of the world,
but I'm not sure comparing the specific migration crisis
along the Belarus-EU border with everyday migration along Iran's border
with Afghanistan is helpful here.
I think Europeans are reacting strongly in this case,
because this particular migration crisis they're facing has been meticulously engineered by a
dictator and his regime who are attempting to use migration as a way to destabilize Europe.
They're tapping into a human smuggling network, providing visas, housing, flights, and busing
migrants to the border where they help migrants cross.
The involvement of the Belarusian state at every level of this crisis is, I think,
why we are seeing such a strong reaction here in Europe.
Part of that strong reaction has been the EU threatening Belarus with more sanctions.
We have seen Belarus threatened to shut one of the pipelines that supplies natural gas from Russia to Europe, the Russians were not happy about that.
What is the endgame here? How does this end?
Well, one of the new developments that we've seen is that airlines have announced that they will stop flying migrants into Belarus after the EU threatened to sanction them.
But for the meantime, it does seem that fewer migrants have been showing up to the border, which is really something.
On one hand, it sort of gives Poland a way to say, look, our strict and harsh reaction here did the trick.
And on the other hand, you have humanitarian groups pointing out, well, OK, but you're still breaking international law by refusing these migrants in the first place.
Last week, we saw Germany's acting chancellor, Angela Merkel, who's
outgoing now. She spoke to both Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko himself,
and there are signs that Moscow and Minsk might be changing their strategy. So as for the endgame,
we're not sure yet, but we do know the EU is preparing its fifth round of sanctions on
officials in the Lukashenko regime.
And that is what's happening on a high policy level.
But just to remind, these are real people being affected on the border.
As the days have grown colder, we mentioned these reports that migrants were moved to an indoor shelter,
but that's only after a number of people have died.
So, so far, there have been at least nine recorded deaths, but observers
think there have been many more. This past weekend, a 14-year-old Kurdish boy died of hypothermia
on the Belarusian side of the border. And also this past weekend, on the Polish side, a funeral
was held for Ahmad al-Hassan. Ahmad was a 19-year-old Syrian man who had lived in a refugee camp in Jordan since he was
12. He was forced by Belarusian soldiers to swim across the river that makes up the border with
Poland, but he couldn't swim, and so he drowned. Polish divers retrieved his body, and an imam
that I interviewed along the border presided over his funeral this past weekend. Ahmad's mother
and brother joined the funeral via video link. And it was a pretty emotional moment because his mother refused to believe
that her son had died until she saw his coffin at the funeral. And she couldn't go on with it.
She just disconnected from the link.
It's awful.
Yeah. And Ahmed Al-Hassan was, in the end, buried in a Muslim cemetery
along the Polish side of the border.
Some heartbreaking detail there from NPR's Rob Schmitz in Berlin.
Thank you, Rob.
Thanks.
And we've got links in our episode notes where you can find more of Rob's reporting on this story.
Our thanks to him and to NPR's Kevin Beasley for their help with this episode.
It's Consider This.
From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.