In the second half of 2021, a systematic effort by the Belarusian government created a crisis on the EU’s eastern border: the authorities in Minsk began bringing would-be migrants into Belarus, then transporting them to the frontier with Poland and the Baltic states. Although Russia’s subsequent full-scale invasion of Ukraine drew attention away from the manufactured problem, the situation has only gotten worse. In 2024 alone, 17,000 people entered the EU illegally through Belarus — three times more than in the year before.
Refugees are undeterred by the physical obstacles — metal fences topped with barbed wire — which Lithuania and Poland erected in 2022 (with Latvia planning to finish its own by the end of this year). Numerous accounts have been collected showing that Belarusian border guards themselves transported migrants all the way up to the barriers, and when a similar crisis broke out on the Russian-Finnish border in 2023,
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Russia’s FSB had played the leading role in creating that copycat scheme. Now, a former Belarusian border guard tells […] how he escorted migrants to the border, while an Iranian refugee described how he managed to cross into the EU in 2023 with the help of the Belarusian authorities.
We were bound by a separate set of instructions signed by Alexander Lukashenko. For instance, it said that upon spotting a suspicious person in the border zone, we had to fire two warning shots into the air and a third directly at the person. – A former conscript of the Belarusian Border Service.
The officers started shouting slogans about Lithuanian enemies and instructing us on how we would move migrants across the border into Lithuania. – A former conscript of the Belarusian Border Service.
They [the Belarusian border guards] warned us: if you go back to Belarus, they’ll beat you up. --* M., an Iranian refugee*
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The people have been lied to by Belarus - make it a problem of Belarus. Raise the UN concern, sanction the fuckers to shreds.
You think you’ll help people if you just let them in? They’ll scale this shit 10 times and more and more people would get hurt. You are dealing with hostile government, they have resources to do that (especially that it’s net positive for them as they take payments from them).
Belarus already is sanctioned. Humanitarian duties are not dependent on who is responsible. It is the legal obligation of Poland and the EU to provide for these people. It is equally their legal obligation not to torture them, push them back across the border or in some cases kill them.
Belarus cannot scale up these operations indefinitely and it would be comparable easy for the EU to deport people back to Iraq or other countries of origin, if it is found that they are not at a danger in those countries. They are undeniably at danger in the “death zone” between the border fences.
In the current situation Putin and Lukashenko get exactly what they want. They can show to the world that the EU countries are criminals, who give fuck all about human rights and international law when it doesn’t fit their larger political goals. Furthermore it helps keeping the narrative of refugee “crisis” going, which helps the Russian backed Fascists like the AfD, Front National and the like. By simply not making it a crisis, it wouldn’t be a crisis, but the deep rooted Racism in the “middle” of many EU countries pushes them to imagine a crisis and help the Fascists. They also know that this helps the Fascists but they keep doing it, because less Racism and more human rights is seen as worse than a Fascist takeover.
Meanwhile countries like Poland, Germany, France, Italy and others are running into a demographic crisis. They urgently need younger people. By reinforcing the hatred towards migrants and refugees, Russia also helps maintain the EU to get weaker demographically. A problem Russia is facing at an unprecedented level themselves, now that they send their young men to die in Ukraine by the hundreds of thousands.
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The government that uses these humans as pawns in their power game will not care for them.
You cannot win a power game by racing to the bottom with the opponent. The sanctions will hit the devasted people living in a brutal dictatorship and the only way to directly hit the perpetrators is by establishing rules on the movement of capital and that will be prevented by a multitude of moneyed interests.
“Just send them back” is the naive approach.
To be fair though, “Just let them in” isn’t very promising either, if you’re not keen on having far-right governments…
The far-right governments are not being voted in based on material shortcomings produced through immigration or refugees.
There are material shortcomings based largely on wealth inequality and the immigrants/refugees are a scapegoat.
If we start throwing others under the bus to appease the far right we lose by default. We must demand and provide a life of dignity for everyone, this is a distribtuion issue.
True. But they are voted in based on perceived or feared material shortcomings produced through immigration or refugees. And they are scarily successful with this.
In politics, emotions can be as important as facts, whether we like that or not. When after Fukushima the German sentiment towards nuclear power soured even further, the government reacted although nuclear power rationally didn’t become more unsafe there, it was a decision largely based on emotions. (Absolutely not trying to incite one of these toxic online nuclear debates, just the first example that came to my mind)
I guess the main problem here is that there is no rock-solid and clearly transparent mechanism in Europe governing refugees and immigration. Or even clearly distinguishing the two. Each country is tinkering with its own solution, although European laws and regulations exist and overlap each other. Some regulations such as Dublin only exist on paper, some countries don’t want to participate at all.
All of this leads to a system that fails to convey trust. And if the population has doubts in a system, it is very easy for an extreme party to further accelerate these doubts.
Yeah, I am there with you. There is a book ont the topic thatI like (altough I disagree on many things with the author) called “the way is shut” by benjamin studebaker. It is way too expensive, but I heard of some pdfs somewhere…
Thats how the sanctions are supposed to work. You hit people, people’s live conditions deteriorate rapidly and they riot.
So starved and (militarily) uneducated people should revolt against a dictatorship with fighter jets and drones? Or are you starving them enough so that they won’t pay the military or mercenaries? What kind of revolutionary nostalgia is this, we aren’t living in the 1800s any more.
Fine, you are right, lets just do business as usual with them. I mean why shouldn’t we trade with countries that dream to counquer us?
My point is that there are sanctions that would hit them and we must pass those. The moment we try to justify the preventable mass deportation and mass starvation of others we lose to gametheory.