Belarus: migrants evacuated from camps housed in a reception center

Is this the beginning of a way out of the crisis? The migrants stranded for several days at the Belarusian border were rehoused, Thursday, November 18, in a logistics center nearby, while several hundred of them were repatriated to Iraq, after having given up all hope of reaching Europe via the Neighboring Poland.

“As of November 18, all the refugees from the makeshift camp on the Belarusian-Polish border, near the Brouzgui crossing point, were transferred, on a voluntary basis to a logistics center,” said border guards. Belarus on Telegram. Photos of the seemingly abandoned camp were released.

As of Tuesday evening, more than a thousand people had already taken refuge in this vast shed near the border, but some 800 others, according to Minsk, had still spent the night outside in temperatures below 0 ° C in tents or near campfires.

The latter were finally relocated due to “deteriorating weather conditions”. In the hangar, migrants receive, according to Belarusian border guards, “hot meals, warm clothes and basic necessities”.

The makeshift camp, set in a wooded area not far from the Brouzgui border post, has been occupied by up to some 2,000 people in recent days.

A sign of the human tragedies unfolding in this cold and humid forest, the Polish International Aid Center, an NGO, said on Thursday it had intervened with a Syrian couple who said they had lost their one-year-old son.

Claiming to follow this “tragic news”, European Parliament President David Sassoli said it was “heartbreaking to see a child die in the cold at the gates of Europe”.

“Humanitarian corridor”

Thursday evening, 431 migrants were repatriated to Iraq, most of them to Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan where the majority are from, the others to Baghdad.

Many children and women were on this repatriation flight, the first since the start of the migration crisis, organized, according to Baghdad, “on a voluntary basis”.

The evacuation of these migrants comes after a week of growing tensions between Belarus and the European Union.

Belarus, which is accused of orchestrating this influx by issuing visas in revenge for Western sanctions, said Thursday that 7,000 migrants were on its territory, saying it was ready to “repatriate” 5,000 of them.

Minsk also assured that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met Wednesday with authoritarian Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, would negotiate with the EU a “humanitarian corridor” to evacuate the remaining 2,000 migrants to Germany.

“Germany did not agree to this,” a government source in Berlin told AFP.

G7 convictions

On Thursday, the great powers of the G7 “condemned the orchestration by the Belarusian regime” of this migratory crisis, calling on Minsk to end it “immediately” and to authorize access to humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, on the ground, attempts to cross the border continued.

Warsaw, which has erected a barbed wire fence and deployed more than 15,000 soldiers on its border, announced Thursday that it had arrested some 200 people who had managed to enter its territory illegally the previous night.

According to Polish border guards, around 500 migrants attempted to cross the border. During this attempt, five people from the same family, including three children aged 7 to 9, were injured and had to be hospitalized, border guards said.

The Polish Defense Ministry accused Belarusian “special forces” of “forcing migrants to throw stones at Polish soldiers in order to distract them”.

The incident could not be independently verified, as journalists are banned in the immediate border area on the Polish side.

In another incident, video footage released by Belarusian border guards showed a Lithuanian border guard dog biting a man lying on the ground in a sleeping bag.

“Solidarity” with Poland

Since the start of the crisis in summer, at least 11 migrants have died on both sides of the border, according to humanitarian organizations.

If Brussels strongly criticized the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, several European officials nevertheless resumed speaking with him, causing concern in Warsaw.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Thursday denounced any attempt at official talks with the regime of Alexander Loukachenko, believing that this would amount to “legitimizing” it.

French President Emmanuel Macron reiterated Thursday “his full solidarity with Poland” during two telephone conversations with his counterpart Andrzej Duda and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

He also, according to the Élysée, “reaffirmed the need for Europe to maintain pressure on Alexander Lukashenko”, whose re-election last year was not recognized by Westerners, who denounced massive fraud.

With AFP