The number of refugees caught on the Polish-Belarusian border has been increasing. As the air temperature falls, the situation is becoming steadily worse with hundreds of refugees, including children, being reportedly pushed back and denied the right to apply for asylum. Although many are sick, exhausted, hungry, and thirsty, the Polish and Belarusian authorities are said to be denying them shelter and humanitarian assistance.
Another death on the border
On Wednesday 14 October, the body of a 24-year old Syrian man was found on the Polish-Belarusian border in the state of emergency zone in eastern Poland, the country’s media stated. This incident comes less than two weeks after another five refugees were reported to have died.
However, aid organization workers have expressed certainty that the number of refugees who have died is much higher.
“We think that there are many more deaths than we know about. Refugees, we meet tell us that they have seen bodies lying in the forest on the Belarusian side, where the forest is very deep, and there are neither houses nor villages there for people to get help,” Piotr Bystrianin, President of the humanitarian Ocalenie Foundation, told DevelopmentAid.
The Polish authorities are still applying illegal pushbacks of exhausted, sick, and very often starving refugees, including children, Bystrianin confirmed. Border officers very rarely accept asylum applications or they appear to accept these when refugees are accompanied by their legal representatives from local NGOs but they then later push them back to Belarus again even if they have health problems.
“We called an ambulance for a man who had symptoms of a heart attack. The man was taken to the hospital and when his condition was stable, border officers picked him up and threw him out into the forest,” said Bystrianin.
At the end of September, a group of about 20 refugees including Syrians, Yazidis, and Kurds were taken to a border patrol facility in Michałów town close to the border. The Yazidis’ lives in Iraq are in danger as they are a persecuted group. There were also several children in the group aged from only a couple of months to 14 years old. Subsequently, they disappeared and when asked by journalists what had happened to those children, Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the ruling Law and Justice Party, said that “they are in a safe place.” On 12 October, the group was found in the forest on the Belarusian side. This confirms that the Polish border officers pushed them back leaving the group with no food or drinking water and unable to move either towards Belarus or Poland.
Bystrianin also highlighted that a group of about 50 refugees mainly from Afghanistan and Iraq who have been trying to cross the border since last August were still stuck without shelter on the Polish-Belarusian border and their condition was deteriorating.
“Polish border officers lie and threaten people. They tell migrants that they will take them to a safe place, but in fact, they take them to the forest. Refugees have also reported that officers destroyed their mobile phones or took their memory cards,” said Bystrianin.
Hypothermia, hunger, and fear
Kaja Filaczyńska, a doctor with the volunteer group, “Medycy na granicy,” (Doctors on the Border), told DevelopmentAid that the people they help suffer mostly from hypothermia, infections, or dehydration as they are forced to stay in the wet and cold forest for long periods of time.
“We work shifts with three medical specialists, there is always a driver, lifeguard, and a physician, usually an anesthetist. Sometimes we receive a lot of requests, at other times we just wait on standby. Colleagues who worked the shift after me assisted three people – a woman, a man, and a two-year-old child. The woman had hypothermia and she was in a serious condition, she couldn’t move, the man was weak and the child was stable. All of them were taken to the hospital,” said Filaczyńska.
Unfortunately, doctors are not allowed in the state of emergency zone where, as Filaczyńska said, many more people are in a poor condition and need urgent medical help.
While low temperatures and the lack of drinking water and food lead to incapacitation and life-threatening conditions, the refugees are very often afraid to call an ambulance or light a fire to keep warm.
“Medical assistance entails pushback and deportation; thus, people decide to call doctors only as a last resort. Pushbacks themselves are physically exhausting for people, they have to go through mud and razor wires back and forth with children, that’s why they prefer to hide in the forest to as not be detected,” Nina Boichenko, a scientist dealing with migration at the Polish Academy of Science, told DevelopmentAid.
When she joined the humanitarian aid group, Grupa Granica (Border Group), as a volunteer she took part in one of the missions to bring relief to a family from the Congo.
“We reached them at night, I didn’t see much as we couldn’t use flashlights to avoid being seen by border control. I brought food and drink for nine people. It was a family with four children, three of them lying on the ground. One child was not even six months old, two others were about three to five years old and the oldest girl was around six. There were three men with them. One of them was standing and the other two were lying on the ground. They were so weak that they weren’t able to stand up,” she said.
Dzwonił kolega z Białowieży. Rzekł – nie daję rady, żyjemy w jakimś obozie koncentracyjnym, nie umiem tego unieść, chcą bym był wspólnikiem, mam nie pomagać, jak ja będę z tym żył? 3 lata za pomaganie, ale jest i 3 za nieudzielenie pomocy. Idą setki przez bagna, są tak …
1/n— Amazonia_is_here ⚪❤️⚪ (@Ecology_now) October 14, 2021
Boichenko added that the group was afraid to apply for asylum because the border officers would not accept applications and they treated every attempt to submit an application as an opportunity to push people back to Belarus.
This dramatic thread on Twitter written by one of the locals living in the state of emergency zone says that people living in the zone covertly help the refugees by hiding them in their houses for which they could be punished by the authorities. As the author of Tweet claims, 130 people from the zone will face charges. However, some inhabitants of the zone refuse to leave people alone in the forest and allow them to die so they will not inform the border officers about the presence of refugees. The author of the post compared the atmosphere in the zone to that in former concentration camps.
Overview
On 12 October alone, Polish border officers recorded 470 attempts to cross the border. The figure has reached 6,700 from the beginning of this month and the total number of refugees recorded in 2021 stands at 18,300. Nevertheless, this does not represent a true picture as many people remain undetected and successfully reach Germany. The German Federal Police recorded 200 migrants in August while in September the figure was 1,500 and there were another 600 in the first week of October alone. They are sent to special camps which now are almost full. The refugees who are detained, and in majority of cases pushed back on the Polish-Belarusian border, come from Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Kongo, and Iraq and include Yazidis and Kurds who, as persecuted groups, are protected by international law.
