Today, Explained - Belarus manufactures a migrant crisis

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

Belarus is promising migrants passage to Europe knowing the EU will turn them away. Today’s show was produced by Haleema Shah with help from Amina Al-Sadi, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for them. We have covered a lot of refugee crises on the show. Ones here on the southern border of the United States, Syria, the Rohingya. We recently talked about the Afghans a lot, but we've never covered one like the refugee crisis taking place right now on the border between Belarus and Poland. Because get this, this refugee crisis on the border of Belarus and Poland

was completely engineered by Belarus. Before we get to that, we first have to talk about the situation at the border. Sarah Sinkirova is a freelance journalist who's been reporting on it. The Polish-Belarusian border is one of EU's external borders to the east. It's a very cold part of the world. So right now, as the winter is approaching, the temperatures fall below zero. And we are talking about a very long border, several hundred kilometers long. And we are mostly talking about woods and fields.

And right now we're talking about a war zone. The zone is essentially militarized. It's protected, so no one is allowed in, not even humanitarian workers or aid workers or journalists. The police inform, if you don't follow the workers, phones may be used against you. The security forces are essentially guarding the border. And there is a paramedic team that also works at the border that rescues refugees out of the woods because most of these refugees and migrants suffer from hypothermia right now

and also from other conditions that are related to the cold and and the thirst and the lack of basic supplies but i would say for the most part hypothermia is is the biggest problem and it's really a humanitarian crisis so so how did this wooded frozen almost uninhabitable area between Belarus and Poland essentially become a migrant camp? Essentially what happened is that thousands of refugees and migrants and asylum seekers flew into Belarus, arrived in Minsk, and then traveled to the border because they have heard that the route to Europe would become available through Belarus through the Polish-Belarusian border and for some of them of course they wanted to continue to other countries or simply ask for asylum in Poland

and so thousands of refugees and migrants and asylum seekers from countries like Syria and Iraq and even Libya had flown into Belarus and ended up stranded at this border. Ten days we've been here without water, temperatures are minus five, and what can we do? Where are the human rights organizations? We were a good country. They invaded Iraq in 2003. We've lost everything. We've sold our cars and sold our houses. They've destroyed our country and now this is their human rights? How do these largely Iraqi, Syrian and Yemeni migrants get to Belarus in the first place? heard from the migrants and refugees is that they have seen these, I don't know what to call them, but let's say fake adverts from quote-unquote travel agencies in their respective countries telling them that the route to Europe would become possible, that it's possible to go to Belarus

most of the time on tourist visa without any problems, and that they could just buy a visa and then a plane ticket to Minsk and then it would be possible for them to access Europe from there. Belarus gave us visa. We came here to go to Europe. How much did you have to pay for the whole package to come? $2,000. So once migrants pay thousands of dollars to travel to Belarus, according to reports we're seeing, what happens to them? So based on my information and on the interviews that I've conducted, most to the border, which is approximately, I think, 200 miles away, something like that. Essentially, what is happening is that once the refugees and migrants arrive at the border, it is very hard for them to get either into Poland or even to get back because they are behind a fence. And there has been reports, and this is something that I've seen when I was reporting from Poland,

is that we know that there are pushbacks on both sides, by both Polish and Belarusian authorities. In the night, they told us, you will go to Poland. They cut the fence. The Belarusians cut for us and we ran. We ran a lot and then we hide ourselves in the forest. They see us and return back to the site. It is like a football game. We are in the middle. So they are being pushed back by both sides.

And as I was saying earlier, there is this emergency zone. So no one, no aid groups or aid professionals or doctors or journalists are allowed in closer to the border. So these refugees and migrants are essentially stranded there. And no one really knows how many people are there exactly? The media report that it could be around 3,000, 4,000 refugees and migrants, including families, including, you know, babies and breastfeeding mothers who are stranded at the border with no real possibility to kind of move forward either way. And with the freezing temperatures, this has become a really, really worrying trend. Attention, attention.

All us baby crying for milk, for a nappy, we don't have nothing. Please come and help these people. These migrants and refugees are kind of, you know, camping out or they are sleeping in, you know, sleeping bags. But sometimes they don't even have that. I know that on the Polish side, volunteers have been distributing them, you know, blankets and hot tea and even like some, you know, electric heaters that they could use because of the cold. But this is really, you know, only the few people who have managed to cross the border. But most of these people don't have anything. They don't have a shelter. And that's why it's so worrying. And, you know, particularly for small children who can be very vulnerable to hypothermia. And I recently interviewed a doctor who was helping on the border from the Polish side. And she described this case where a child was suffering from hypothermia and the mom or the dad, the parents basically had to lie on the child to kind of protect the child from the cold. So they were

essentially protecting the child with their own body. So this is, you know, the kind of situation, this is how people have to improvise to survive there. So these migrants have been pushed back and forth across the border, and now they're stuck. What happens next? They are facing death because we don't know if they are going to be allowed in and the temperatures fall below zero. And for someone who's been there for a long time, obviously they are in a very bad health condition. So I don't know if there's any options. Of course, people who have already managed to cross into Poland can ask for asylum, provided that they are not pushed back, because people managed to cross to the Polish side. Oftentimes they were rescued out

of the woods by medical teams or paramedic teams, and then they were taken to the hospital. And then local sources and lawyers told me that we know that there are pushbacks in a way that the Polish border guards wait in front of the hospital so that once the patient is released from hospital, they take him and they, you know, they push him back towards the border. So even when people try and ask for asylum, they can still be pushed back kind of, you know, illegally or like, you know, in non-accordance to humanitarian law and human rights conventions. We know that these people, for the most part, are just stranded there and we don't know what's going to happen to them next. And that's why it's so important to talk about

this and, you know, and to use humanizing language and to talk about these human stories above all else, I would say. So this man fled Syria due to the war. He was from Aleppo. He tried to approach Europe through the Mediterranean, through Libya, and then he heard that the route to Europe would become possible. Through Belarus, he bought a plane ticket and a visa. And of course, he had no idea that he would end up essentially freezing in the woods. And he's been telling me that he's been there for more than a month now and that he is essentially dying.

He's with a group of other migrants. And one of his friends is there with his four children. And he described that one of the worst things for him was to watch these children die in front of his eyes because they are all freezing there without water and food and they are all injured and sick at this entire crisis was engineered by Belarus. More on that in a minute on Today Explained. Today Explained Thank you. you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend.

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an authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. We'll be right back. at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Amy McKinnon, foreign policy. It's hard to believe, but Belarus is engineering this migrant crisis? In a word, yes. Beginning this summer, we began to see just all of a sudden dozens of people, hundreds of people coming from the Middle East, predominantly from Iraq, from Syria, from Yemen, coming to the Belarusian border and trying to make their way

into Latvia and Lithuania and into Poland now. We've heard reports of all of a sudden an unusual proliferation of Belarusian tourist agencies in the Middle East issuing visas to individuals and sometimes group visas. People in these countries are paying their life savings. They're gathering money from friends and family, you know, thousands of dollars for flights to Minsk, the Belarusian capital, for visas in the hopes of making it to the border and making it into the European Union. So why is Belarus doing this? Why is President Alexander Lukashenko doing this? He's lashing out. If we remember, August of 2020, there was presidential elections in Belarus, which are widely believed to have been falsified. And in response, the Belarusian people took to the streets in the tens and hundreds of thousands. We are here to show that we never elected him and that we want the change,

that we want the new country with a new president. And the Belarusian authorities cracked down very brutally, very violently. There's over 800 political prisoners now in Belarus. And in response, the European Union imposed sanctions on the regime, as did the United States. One of the weaknesses of the European Union, which is that the EU more broadly, not just these countries on the border, does not have an idea of how to handle yet or respond to migration from people coming from war zones and conflict-worn countries. And so he has been able to exploit one of the bloc's biggest weaknesses. And how does Poland feel about this? They're responding pretty brutally.

They've deployed 15,000 troops and border guards to the border with Belarus, and they're trying best they can to keep these people in Belarus. And of course, that's received criticism from humanitarian organizations because we don't know. These people, many of them may well have claims to asylum which they have the right to to ask for um when they make it across the border and so far the polish authorities are really trying to handle this by themselves they haven't tried to ask for help from from the european union's border agency frontex whereas lithuania did but of course like any politician, they're also not letting a good

crisis go to waste. They've used this issue domestically to try and push the message of the ruling Law and Justice Party, which is a very nationalist, very conservative party, which has really made immigration a hot button issue. The chair of the party, Jaroslav Kaczynski, has previously said some very controversial things about migrants and asylum seekers. And so they've capitalized on this as well for their own domestic political gain. And Poland probably isn't the final destination for a lot of these migrants. How is the EU responding to what's happening on this border? So, so far on the surface, the EU has really stood by Poland and the Baltic states on this. They're trying to project an image of unity because Europe has a shared problem in responding,

not just to this crisis, but the kind of broader issue of having an increasingly rogue dictator backed by Russia on your doorstep. So they've tried to project an image of unity. Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, visited the Polish capital last week and he said Poland is facing a serious crisis which should enjoy the solidarity and the unity of the European Council, visited the Polish capital last week. And he said Poland is facing a serious crisis, which should enjoy the solidarity and the unity of the European Union. Because we need to be firm. What's happening is serious and we need to react firmly.

We need to be united. He's even previously spoken about helping Poland fund some kind of structure at the border, be that a wall or a fence. Based on an opinion of the legal service of the council, it's legally possible, based on the current legal framework at the European level, to finance infrastructure. So on the surface, there's, you know, there's calls for unity. But of course, I think, you know, you're also beginning to see some tensions around the very robust, shall we say, nature with which Poland

is trying to kind of rebuff these people. And this comes at a time of broader tensions between Poland and the European Union. Recent domestic decisions made by the Polish authorities, which have been seen as deeply troubling to the European Union and as a snub to the bloc. We're talking about like Poland passing laws that violate the EU constitution? So one of the top courts in Poland recently passed a law which essentially says the Polish law has supremacy over European Union law. And so that really attacks one of the foundational tenets of the European Union, which is that to have the bloc function as a bloc of countries, you have to have some shared laws and that those laws will apply across the bloc and so people have have increasingly become concerned about a so-called poll exit that Poland will follow the UK and make steps towards leaving the European Union and

they've been fined I think it's something like a million euros per day following this decision so the European Union has taken it very very seriously indeed. So all that kind of wider context is bubbling in the background to this current crisis over the border. Okay, so needless to say, things are complicated between Poland and Belarus, and they're also complicated between Poland and the EU. And the EU is sort of supporting what Poland's doing right now on the border, but also not? How does the EU feel about people dying, about Poland taking, you know, pretty harsh, heavy-handed measures against these migrants? I think that's something which the EU is grappling with right now, is how can they address this broader crisis? And unlike in 2015, where people were making their way overseas and over land themselves to the European Union.

You know, this time there's a very natural bottleneck and the people are flying into Belarus. And so that provides an opportunity. And we know that Brussels is in dialogue with a lot of the countries where these people are originating from. If you can kind of stem those lines of how people are making their way into Belarus, that could be a way to stem the crisis. So that is something that they're looking into just now. And over the weekends, there are some airlines from the region have said that they're going to stop taking people from Syria, Iraq, and I think Yemen as well, that are flying into Belarus as a way to kind of address the root causes of this problem. But I mean, in the meantime, there is a dire humanitarian crisis going on at the border of Poland. I mean, there's, I think, a few thousand people estimated to be trapped there right now.

Some of them are making it through the fence. There's been some reports of local people from these villages kind of setting up these ad hoc groups to try and provide warm clothes, food, shelter, batteries for cell phones that people are using to navigate as and when they find people. But we do know that already, I think eight people are known to have as and when they find people. But we do know that already, I think,

I think eight people are known to have died at the border, but humanitarian agencies say it's likely to be much higher than that. And as the winter gets increasingly colder, unfortunately, I fear they won't be the last. What levers can the EU pull to prevent Belarus from continuing to bring in migrants who are, you know, left out to freeze on the border. We'll see what impact it has of these airlines saying that they're going to stop flying in people. Not that they're going to stop flying in people, but they're going to stop taking people from certain countries with visas to Belarus that are presumed to be trafficked, essentially, by the Belarusian authorities to the border. That may go some way. And of course, the EU, I think this week, is expected to announce further sanctions on the Belarusian authorities to the border. That may go some way. And of course, the EU, I think this week,

is expected to announce further sanctions on the Belarusian authorities. And there's more in their toolkit that they can do there. I think there's talk of issuing sanctions against Belavia, the Belarusian National Airline, also Minsk Airport. So they have a few more things that they can do. But whether or not that's going to make the Belarusian authorities change their mind,

they've weathered sanctions before. they can likely weather them again. But there is certainly more options that the EU has at its disposal here. But Belarus is the one provoking here. I mean, I'm sure sanctions were an expected outcome for them. How much could this continue to escalate? Could this end up being a military conflict between the EU and Belarus or at least Belarus and distract the Polish border guards on the other side. We've heard certainly reports of blanks being fired. It's an extremely tense situation. I should add that this crisis at the border between Belarus and Poland is of course happening whilst there is a Russian military buildup going on by the borders of Ukraine as well. And so these two things are often being discussed in conjunction as well. And a lot of questions about what is the Russian role behind the Belarus situation, because Belarus is now pretty much

wholly dependent on the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. And I think a lot of people are working on the assumption that he wouldn't have tried to start a crisis like this without having at least some kind of wink and a nod assent from the Kremlin. And what's his game plan here? Whose game plan? Sorry. Putin. Crisis in the European Union, crisis in the West. You know, Russian state TV, it's interesting when you watch it, has for years been obsessed with migration in Europe because I think they recognize that this is an issue which we have not yet, and this will be a familiar to many Americans. It's just, it's a challenge which we haven't yet

found a way to address, which is humane and is humanitarian, but also recognizes the need for countries to have control over their borders. And so it's wherever we have those weaknesses in our societies, the Russians and their allies are extremely deft at exploiting them. Is there a chance that this could backfire on Belarus and all of these migrants that Belarus certainly never wanted in its own country might just end up staying there? They can just deport them. It's Belarus.

They're not going to give them due process if they try and apply for asylum. I think it's highly unlikely they're going to give them a fair hearing. It's an authoritarian state ruled by a dictator. They can just send them back to where they came from. These people that are at the border right now, and there's children among them, are caught between crisis upon crisis upon crisis. Their countries have been torn apart by war. This opportunity comes along to make it so tantalizingly close to the European Union.

And once they get to that border, they find themselves caught in this horrific standoff between a dictator and an alliance of democracies, which has been caught flat-footed by this and being treated very brutally amidst that. So it's horrendous human tragedy at the center of this broader geopolitical spat. Amy McKinnon is a national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Our episode today was produced by Halima Shah with help from Amina Alsadi. It's Today Explained. you