Sunday 21 November 2021
Attack with stones and lasers
100 migrants storm the Polish border
Hundreds of migrants are still waiting on the Polish-Belarusian border. Some are trying again to break through the border installations into the EU. Polish officials are also attacked during the operation, which was apparently specifically orchestrated by the Belarusian side.
On the border between Poland and Belarus, according to the Polish border guards, a group of around 100 migrants tried in vain to overcome the fortifications from Belarus. The incident occurred on Saturday shortly before midnight near the town of Czeremsza, said a spokeswoman.
Belarusian security forces drove the group to the border in a truck and threw a wooden walkway over the barbed wire barn. Poland’s uniformed men were pelted with stones and branches and blinded with laser beams. The border guard registered a total of 208 attempts to illegally cross the border. Since Poland does not allow journalists into the area, the information cannot be verified.
In Belarus, the authorities expanded the care of migrants in an emergency shelter in Brusgi on the border with Poland. In the morning, the state agency Belta published pictures of soldiers setting up a tent at the logistics hall that had been converted into a sleeping place. The distribution of food should be possible more quickly, it said. According to estimates, around 2,000 people stayed in the building who refused to return home and instead wanted to go to Germany or other EU countries.
Experts from the World Health Organization visited the property on Sunday. Videos showed the workers being surrounded by migrants. So far, one case of corona disease has been officially confirmed. The Russian state agency Ria Novosti quoted officials at the meeting that 100 migrants had already been taken to hospitals in the city of Grodno. Among them were people with pneumonia or diabetes.
Poland’s head of government warns: “The aim is to destabilize Europe”
The Polish government has meanwhile announced that it is ready to pay for the repatriation of the refugees. “We are in a position to finance the return of migrants to their countries of origin at any moment, we have also developed a lot of diplomatic activities in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East,” said Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki after his meeting with Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallis.
Morawiecki said Poland is also considering closing additional border crossings with Belarus in order to increase economic pressure on the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko. Poland’s head of government will travel to all three Baltic states on Sunday to discuss the situation with the heads of government there.
In a video message published in English, Morawiecki warned that the events on the Polish-Belarusian border were not an “ordinary migration crisis” but a political crisis that had been triggered for a specific purpose. “Your goal is to destabilize Europe for the first time since the end of the Cold War 30 years ago.”
“Europeanization of migration policy is the only way”
The European Commission accused the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko of deceiving migrants. “During the crisis, Lukashenko behaved like an unlicensed tour operator who sold expensive travel packages to the EU, which then collapsed on arrival,” said Ylva Johansson, EU interior commissioner responsible for migration issues, of “Welt am Sonntag”. Families and children were “lured into a tragedy”. According to Johansson, Lukashenko and his government have “a high degree of responsibility for the crisis that has been produced”.
The situation on site has recently eased because the EU and its partners have cooperated. “The ability of the EU to work together across ministries and services, but also across countries and regions, has resulted in the fact that people no longer arrive at Minsk Airport,” said Johansson. This is further proof that “the Europeanization of migration policy is the only way forward”. If the EU worked together on migration policy, it could not only overcome crises, but also make plans to prevent them early on.
The European Union accuses Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko of organizing migrants from crisis regions to the EU’s external border in order to put pressure on the West. The people from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan entered Belarus on tourist visas.