Europe wants secure borders, if necessary wants a protective wall in the east to stop unchecked immigration from Belarus.
Guarantor: Polish border guards who are currently roaming the forests by the thousands to track down illegal immigrants.
But the methods used by Poland’s border guards to push the wave of refugees back on the Belarusian side are met with growing international criticism.
BILD was there, observed border guards, refugee helpers and paramedics. A report by Hans-Jörg Vehlewald and his wife Dorota.
You have to imagine Piotr Mazuruk as a humorous person. In the middle of the border area, the border commander stands in front of half a dozen cameras and jokes with seven Somalis. “Why didn’t you come across our beautiful border crossing?” He asks the group. “Every day there is a train from Minsk to Paris. You could have got out and asked to be admitted. “
Piotr Mazuruk and BILD reporter Hans-Jörg VehlewaldPhoto: Fabian Matzerath
Abdi (23), his brother Daod (16) and Ichro (14), the youngest in the group, hardly understand anything about the jokes of the border guards.
Despite the midday sun, they are freezing, soaked and starving. Her feet are full of wounds, stabbed and inflamed from the night marches through the border forests. Helpers try in vain to put new shoes on to protect them from the cold: their feet are so swollen that no boots fit them. They hobble barefoot to the ambulance for care.
“We have been out in the woods for 15 days,” reports Abdi. “We haven’t eaten anything for four days, drank from puddles. We can’t anymore. “
Ichro almost drowned in one of the rivers the refugees had to swim through on their way west. Another from the group sank into the swamp and had to be pulled out of the silt by the others.
Polish refugee workers around MP Franek Staszewski (33) discovered the group near the village of Maruszek. Activists have been roaming the border area for months, looking for those in need who have traveled from Afghanistan, Syria, Africa via Minsk airport and then by bus to the border to Poland.
After the refugees were rescued by volunteers and provided with first aid, soldiers load them onto trucksPhoto: Fabian Matzerath
Most of the misery refugees are initially stopped at the border fence between Belarus and Poland. Three rolls of Nato barbed wire with razor-sharp hooks force them to stop. They seek shelter on the Belarusian side, then sneak through holes in the fence in the freezing night, and on the Polish side they hide again in the thick undergrowth of the Białowieża Primeval Forest, which has been protected as a World Heritage Site for decades.
At this time of year the jungle with its globally unique bison herds is actually a tourist attraction. But since September 2nd, the state of emergency has been in place: the exclusion zone for all people. Only residents of the border villages are allowed to enter the four-kilometer-wide strip along the 400-kilometer-long border with Belarus.
Backpacks left behind, clothes, empty drinking bottles: photo from the exclusion zone between Poland and Belarus Photo: Fabian Matzerath
Journalists, doctors and lawyers entering the restricted area are fined and imprisoned for 48 hours. Since then, the border troops have been able to take action without outsiders watching their fingers.
The border guards act accordingly rampant, report activists:
- Refugees who are picked up are pushed back to the border and the Belarusian side without any medical care, or they are abandoned directly at the border in the forest. Including children, pregnant women, seriously injured people – like Mohammad Saaed (23), who a few days ago a tree trunk fell on his chest. Volunteer paramedics took care of the Syrian groaning in pain before border guards pushed him and his four Syrian companions back to the Belarusian side without any further care.
- Disguised border guards without badges of rank roam the forests day and night – in army jeeps and trucks on which all marks and references to the unit in which they serve have been unscrewed or carefully glued.
- Asylum requests by immigrants are generally ignored. A new law has been in effect since the end of October, according to which any border commander may push refugees back to Belarus without asking about the reason for immigration.
- Immigration offices have the right to reject or not accept any asylum request at their own discretion. A law that only legitimizes what has been in practice for months. And that, according to Polish and international experts, violates the Polish constitution as well as the Geneva Refugee Convention and the UN and EU human rights charter.
- Even MPs like Franek Steszewski are not allowed into the exclusion zone. Despite constitutionally protected immunity, the politician of the opposition coalition KO is also prevented from reaching the refugees or monitoring the work of the border guards. A video shows how border guards even prevent him from bringing bananas, nuts and medicines to a group of refugees, even though they are camping in a field just 100 meters away under the guard of soldiers.
The seven Somalis, who discovered his helpers in the Maruszka forest, used Steszewski as legal representatives for their asylum applications on Monday of this week. Nevertheless, the MP has since tried in vain to find out from the authorities what has become of the Somali group.
His assumption: after being cared for by volunteer paramedics, they too were secretly brought back to the forests by the border troops of commander Piotr Mazuruk, where temperatures have now fallen well below freezing at night.
Commander Mazuruk also takes this with acidic humor: “These people are like stones. The Belarusians throw them over the fence to us. And we throw them back again … “