The Daily - How Belarus Manufactured a Border Crisis

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

For three decades, President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, a former Soviet nation in Eastern Europe, ruled with an iron fist. But pressure has mounted on him in the past year and a half. After a contested election in 2020, the European Union enacted sanctions and refused to recognize his leadership.In the hopes of bringing the bloc to the negotiating table, Mr. Lukashenko has engineered a migrant crisis on the Poland-Belarus border, where thousands from the Middle East, Africa and Asia have converged.What are the conditions like for those at the border, and will Mr. Lukashenko’s political gamble reap his desired results? Guests: Monika Pronczuk, a reporter covering the European Union for The New York Times; and Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Poland massed thousands of troops on its border with Belarus to keep out Middle Eastern migrants who have set up camp there, as Western officials accuse Belarus’s leader of intentionally trying to create a new migrant crisis in Europe.Belarusian authorities on Thursday cleared the encampments at the main border crossing into Poland, removing for the moment a major flashpoint that has raised tensions across the continent.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

I'm Monika Prączuk. I cover the European Union for The Times and I'm usually based in Brussels. But for the past couple of days I've been reporting from the Polish-Belarusian border, where thousands of asylum seekers from the Middle East are stuck. This is a very, very difficult environment. This is one of Europe's oldest and densest forests. And in the night, the temperatures drop below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And actually, I just came back from being outside for two or three hours, and I'm literally shaking. It's so cold.

So every day I've been going out with activists that are walking around the There were four objects and my dad met the first group. So every day I've been going out with activists that are walking around the forest here, looking for people that do make it through and need help. So we are a couple of hundred meters from the main road and there is a boarding pass. Main road and there is a boarding pass. But sometimes you only find sort of ghosts of migrants that are no longer there. Ah, I cannot see the date. Oh no, it's here, it's 19th of October. So there are boarding passes.

Fresh dates from Iran. Winter shoes. And backpacks. Sleeping bags. Empty medicine packages. Baby diapers. And backpacks. Sleeping bags. Empty medicine packages. Baby diapers. Hygienic pads. We even found a box of eyeshadow.

Yeah, it's a weird, weird sight in this forest. So we've been finding all those objects that were signs that there were people there recently, but we have not seen actual people crossing until Sunday night when the activists alerted us that they were going to rescue two Syrian men. We walked through the forest and we arrived and there are two men wrapped in those thermal blankets you

know the ones that look like tinfoil used for marathons and they're basically completely pale they were incapable of saying anything they barely managed to tell us their names and where they're from, and that they were brothers. And they had such advanced stage of hypothermia, they were unable to move. One of the paramedics was just tending to them and just said, wow, we really caught them in the last moment of their lives. We begin tonight with that border crisis at the doorstep of the European Union.

Thousands of refugees are trapped between those countries as they try to make their journey further into Europe. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Polish riot police fired tear gas and unleashed water cannon on migrants after they were pelted with stones. Today. Inside the high-stakes standoff playing out at the border between Poland and Belarus. I spoke with two of my colleagues who've been reporting from the border, of my colleagues who've been reporting from the border, Monika Pronchuk and Anton Choyanovsky, about how a political gamble by a desperate leader has become a diplomatic and humanitarian crisis. It's Friday, November 19th. Anton, tell us who these people are at the border,

who our colleague Monica just described, and how it is that they came to be at the border between Belarus and Poland. They are thousands of people from the Kurdistan region of Iraq, from Syria, from countries in Africa like Eritrea and Nigeria, from Asia, from Afghanistan, from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan. These are people from all over the world. That's an incredibly broad cross-section of people. That's an incredibly broad cross-section of people. Absolutely. And they've all converged in Belarus, which is not a member of the European Union, but that borders the EU to the east. So all these people have been flying to Belarus with the hope of being able to get to the border and step across the border into Poland, which is a member of the EU, where they would be able to claim asylum and have a better life. But why would all these people from all these different countries be arriving in the exact same place, Belarus, of all places, and use that as their way into the European Union?

There are many different ways into the EU. So why Belarus? I mean, to put it bluntly, it's because the leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, wanted them there. He is essentially using migration as a way to put pressure on the European Union. And Anton, why would Lukashenko do that? Well, that has everything to do with the position that Lukashenko has found himself in for the last year and a half. This is Mr. Lukashenko. He has ruled Belarus since 1994 and has been dubbed Europe's last dictator. This is a man who has run this Eastern European country that used to be part of the Soviet Union with an iron fist for almost 30 years.

Official exit polls claim that Alexander Lukashenko has won a landslide victory. He declared victory in a highly disputed election last year. The August 9th Belarus presidential elections were neither free nor fair. Around the world, especially in the West, governments saw that as a fraudulent election. The EU does not recognize their falsified results. The European Union didn't recognize Lukashenko as a legitimate president. There were huge street protests in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, that Lukashenko violently put down. He arrested

thousands of people. The 27 heads of government and top EU leaders decided to impose economic sanctions on the former Soviet Republic and Lukashenko. Those protests led to sanctions from the European Union and from other Western countries. Then in May... Today, Lukashenko personally caused an international scandal. Lukashenko forced a European commercial jet to land in Minsk as it was passing over Belarus in order for the Belarusian security forces to arrest a Belarusian dissident who was on board. Right. Very brazen, very terrifying to the rest of the world. Absolutely. I mean, that was what a lot of European countries

at the time were calling a state-sponsored hijacking. This outlandish action by Lukashenko will have serious implications. And they leveled more sanctions against Lukashenko. So he's really become a pariah, especially for the EU. And clearly Lukashenko was looking for a way to strike back. And that's where migration comes in. Because Lukashenko has said for years to the Europeans that he's helping them,

that he's protecting the EU's eastern flank from illegal migrants. And he's also always said that if he wanted to, he could stop doing that. He could stop helping the EU protect itself from these external forces. And this summer, he clearly made the decision to make good on his threat. And how did he make good on his threat? So the bottom line is he made it easier for people from around the world who were looking to get into the EU to come to Belarus. He made it easier to get visas.

The Belarusian state airline and the Minsk airport added a bunch of flights to places like Syria, Beirut. Wait, they added new flights from those countries? Absolutely, yeah. There were regular flights to Damascus added. There were regular flights to Baghdad added. There were more flights added to Istanbul and Dubai and major travel hubs in that region. And there's also a lot of evidence that companies owned by the Belarusian state were facilitating this. There was a Belarusian state-owned tourist company that was organizing these visas. These people who were coming to Belarus were being put up in hotels in Minsk that were run by the Belarusian presidential administration.

And then in the summer, large numbers of migrants start arriving in Minsk. A lot of them are put up in state-owned hotels in the capital. They are, in some cases, according to Western officials, taken to the border on military buses or in other ways organized by the Belarusian authorities. in other ways organized by the Belarusian authorities. And probably the biggest evidence of Belarusian state involvement in this crisis is what's actually happening at the border, which is that Belarusian border guards are not trying to prevent, as they normally would, people from trying to cross the border illegally. And in fact, our colleagues have spoken to migrants and what they're reporting is that these migrants are being told what to do by the Belarusian security forces,

that the Belarusian authorities have handed out wire cutters and axes to help the migrants cut through the border fence, separating Belarus from Poland. So there's no sense that the Belarusian authorities are trying to somehow prevent these people from crossing illegally. And there's a lot of evidence that they are trying to facilitate this. Anton, is it fair to say that without all of this assistance from Lukashenko's government, that these people would not have made it into Belarus and to the border. Yes. Obviously, many thousands of people in the Middle East and elsewhere have long wanted to come to Europe. But Belarus was never a major pathway for them to do that. I mean, Belarus is actually quite a closed country and an authoritarian

system. It's quite difficult to come to Belarus. It's a country of 9 million people with one international airport. And until recently, Belarusian border guards were actually doing a decent job keeping migrants out of the EU. Okay, so from everything you've just said, Lukashenko has very much orchestrated this situation. And I guess my question is, how does he think it's going to play out? And if we try to put ourselves into his head for just a moment, knowing that he's so deeply unhappy with these sanctions from the European Union and feeling aggrieved about Europe's efforts to punish him for his behavior, how does he think that drawing all these migrants

into his country and bringing them to the border with a country like Poland is going to make his situation any better? I mean, I think he sees that migration is potentially the most divisive political issue in Europe. It's something that pits right against left inside various countries in Europe. It's something that pits the eastern part of the EU against the western part of the EU. It's an enormously controversial and divisive issue. So I think

he sees this as a really brilliant move, potentially, to hit back against all these sanctions and against the fact that the Europeans haven't even recognized him as the president. This, to Lukashenko, is the way to get back at all that. But to what end? I mean, what does he hope, in the best-case scenario, he might get out of creating this crisis? Well, the evidence we have points to the idea that Lukashenko imagines

that by creating a crisis at the border, he will force European countries to negotiate with him, to recognize him as president, potentially to lift the sanctions that were imposed over the last year. This is a high stakes gambit that he's pursuing. And it's a gambit in which the people who he has brought into Belarus, these migrants seeking a better life in Europe are basically the pawns. Exactly.

We'll be right back. Anton, once all these migrants reach the border of Belarus and Poland, once Lukashenko has manufactured this crisis, what is the response from Poland? And how does that reaction play into Lukashenko's plan or not play into it? So Poland has been doing everything it can to keep these migrants out. What we've seen is Poland massing troops on the border. Thousands of border guards, soldiers, police forces

have been deployed on Poland's eastern border with Belarus. Staying alive. They've created this special exclusion zone along the border where no one is allowed in, whether it's humanitarian aid workers or journalists. And so what we've seen are terrifying images, frankly, of increasingly desperate migrants on the Belarusian side who came there expecting a more or less easy entry into Europe. Many with children and pregnant women.

And then... Attention, attention. We've seen these rows of riot police lined up with shields and wearing helmets to keep people out, to keep people from crossing the border. If you don't follow the orders, force may be used against you. There was even an instance the other day when the Polish police used a water cannon and tear gas to keep people out. And then, you know, you have to remember,

on the other side, on the Belarusian side, these people have been sleeping in the open, in tents, for days. This is mid-November in Eastern Europe. It's getting cold. They've been trying to warm themselves with fires that they set at the camp. So it's just become an extraordinarily bad situation for the people on the ground. Poland really put themselves on war footing, describing this as a grave national security threat, all to keep these people from entering their country.

security threat, all to keep these people from entering their country. So this is a very aggressive response from Poland. And I wonder if this is exactly the kind of fierce response that Lukashenko perhaps was hoping for when he created the situation. It is. Lukashenko, I think, understood the kind of Polish government he was up against. Poland is governed by the nationalist and conservative Law and Justice Party, which actually won the election in October of 2015, right on the heels of the refugee crisis in Europe, campaigning on this idea of we can't let people into Europe and certainly not into our country from the Middle East, from different cultural backgrounds. And just to remind everyone,

this was a wave of thousands upon thousands of migrants, many of them refugees, from many of these same countries who ended up on Europe's doorstep seeking to get inside. Absolutely. And that was something that really fired up right-wing parties across the continent, including Poland. And so this, for the Law and Justice Party, this has been a great opportunity to show those conservative bona fides, to show their people that they are going to stand up for Polish sovereignty, for the sanctity of borders, even if

it means creating this dire humanitarian situation on the other side of the fence. So I think this is what Lukashenko was expecting to provoke. You can see it even in the domestic state media in Belarus that every day are carrying stories about the heartless Poles leaving women and children out in the cold. So is Lukashenko getting what he wanted? I mean, he's getting negative attention for Poland. He's inflicting pain on a European Union country. But is he accomplishing these larger aims of his, of getting sanctions removed, getting European leaders to recognize him as president, and so on? It kind of looked like he was getting some of what he wanted. He was certainly getting the EU's attention.

There was all this attention globally on Belarus, on this tiny country. And then earlier this week, Angela Merkel, the most important leader in all of Europe, calls Lukashenko. Merkel hadn't spoken to him since the disputed election last year. But that's where you see that, you know, maybe he's not really getting all that much out of this in the call. Angela Merkel does not refer to him as president. The readout of the call we get from the German government simply refers to Mr. Lukashenko. And finally, just a few days ago, the EU implemented new sanctions against Belarus. Rather than ratchet back sanctions, they implemented new sanctions against people,

airlines, travel agencies, and others involved in the migrant push. So he's really not getting what he wanted. No, I mean, the situation on the border is getting worse and worse. No, I mean, the situation on the border is getting worse and worse. The European community is uniting around Poland and sort of squarely putting the fault for that awful situation at the border in Lukashenko's lap. People are dying trying to cross the border. And at the border, at least 11 people have died so far as it gets cold

and as people are forced to spend more and more time facing the elements. You know, we also see Lukashenko kind of flailing and rather than gaining authority through this crisis is losing it. Hmm. So where does that leave him? So where does that leave him? It leaves him, it seems, trying to find a negotiated solution. So he's now spoken to Angela Merkel twice this week. There is a lot of talk out there about Lukashenko looking to do a deal where potentially the EU would take some of the migrants from the border while Belarus repatriates others. At this point, it looks like the flow of migrants into Belarus has, for the most part, stopped.

Even the Belarusian state airline has largely stopped flying migrants into Belarus. There are fewer reports of more migrants bound to the border on the ground in Belarus. And he's even apparently cleared out that immediate border area where people were camping out in the open and instead brought people into a warehouse, you know, which looks like kind of a last ditch effort or very belated effort to improve the humanitarian situation there. Hmm. So Lukashenko is very much backing down. He's backing down for the moment, but this remains a really volatile situation, and there are thousands of people who are still at risk here on the ground.

Right. And what becomes now of these thousands of people who have been lured into Belarus by Lukashenko in this political gambit, as we've been describing it, that clearly hasn't worked? What happens to them now? I mean, that's the biggest question. You know, the fact remains there is very little, if any, political will in the European Union to take these migrants in, that'll lead to even more people trying to arrive and that that could only worsen the crisis in the medium term. So it seems like many people want these migrants to be sent back to their home countries. That's starting to happen, but on a minuscule scale. So today, on Thursday, a flight took about 400 migrants from Belarus to Iraq. 400 is a small fraction of the thousands that are there on the ground.

And I think it's hard to imagine all of them leaving that way. A lot are saying they have nowhere to go home to. I wonder, in your conversations with these migrants, Anton, have they absorbed the reality that the leader of Belarus tried to use them for his own political gain and made a promise that he now can't keep to get them into the European Union? And now they're either stuck in Belarus or they're going to have to be returned to their home countries. And how do they feel about that? You know, many of them have realized that they're being used, but they'll still say that this was a chance they had, a unique chance to try to get into the European Union and try to get a much better life for themselves. I mean, you have to

remember that in the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, there were thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean trying to get to Europe by boat, you know, from Libya to Italy, from Turkey to Greece. So by comparison, this land route seemed like a much safer bet to many people. And it is a much safer bet. And, you know, I spoke to one Syrian today who came through Belarus and managed to get into the EU a couple months ago. He was saying, yeah,

he understands that Lukashenko had turned migrants like him into weapons, but he said he didn't care because this was his chance to get out of his war-torn country and try to create a better future for himself. So the question now is, what happens to all those thousands of migrants who remain in limbo? Will they be able to somehow still cross into the EU?

Will they be forced to return to their home countries, even though they might have spent all their life savings to get to Belarus? Or, you know, there are people increasingly saying, maybe we'll just stay in Belarus and try to get asylum in Belarus. It may be an authoritarian country, but it is probably safer than Syria or parts of Iraq. So Alexander Lukashenko, who clearly engineered this crisis in order to put pressure on the EU, might see all these migrants who have stayed behind in Belarus, putting pressure on him. Well, Anton, thank you very much. We really appreciate it.

Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, a judge threw out the convictions of two men found guilty of murdering one of the country's most prominent Black leaders, Malcolm X, more than 50 years ago. The ruling is an acknowledgement of grave errors in the 1966 prosecution of the men, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam,

both of whom spent more than 20 years in prison. An investigation conducted by the Manhattan District Attorney, Cy Vance, found that prosecutors and law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, withheld key evidence that would likely have led both men to be acquitted. evidence that would likely have led both men to be acquitted. But I want to begin by saying directly to Mr. Aziz and his family, and to the family of Mr. Islam and the family of Malcolm X, that I apologize for what were serious, unacceptable violations of law and of public justice. In remarks on Thursday, Muhammad Aziz called himself a victim of the criminal justice system.

However, I hope the same system that was responsible for this travesty of justice also takes responsibility for the immeasurable harm caused to me during the last 55 or 56 years. Thank you. You've led 55 for 56 years. Thank you. Today's episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Muj Zaydi, Claire Tennis-Sketter,

Rochelle Bonja, and Lindsay Garrison. It was edited by Michael Benoit, Patricia Willans, and M.J. Davis-Lynn, contains original music from Dan Powell and Marion Lozano and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to James Hill and Andrew Higgins. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you on Monday.