After accusing Alexander Lukashenko of promoting an influx to “destabilize” the area, Poland finished construction of its 116-mile-long steel wall along the Belarus border.
Nearly half of Poland’s border with the Russian ally is covered by an 18-foot-high barrier that cost close to £300 million to erect.
Since last summer, tens of thousands of migrants and refugees, largely from the Middle East, have entered Poland from Belarus.
The West has accused the Belarusian government of planning the influx with Russia in a “hybrid” attack, a form of conflict involving non-military strategies. Minsk has denied the accusation.
According to Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski, “the barrier we’ve erected separates us from the depressing dictatorship of (Belarus leader Alexander) Lukashenko.”
He said, “Belarus… shares responsibility for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine,” as he spoke in front of the wall in Kuznica, a town in Poland that borders Belarus.
He said that the migrant wave at the Belarusian border was a component of a larger plan to destabilize the entire region, including all of Central and Eastern Europe.
Alexander Lukashenko’s assault on the Polish border with Belarus, according to Morawiecki, was the first indication that there was a conflict in Ukraine.
“We can now concentrate on assisting Ukraine, which is battling to maintain its sovereignty, thanks to (our) political insight and the expectation of what may happen.
“It served as the foundation for the war in Ukraine.”
Prior to Friday, Poland established a no-access zone along the border, which forbade non-citizens—including migrants, relief workers, and media—from entering the area.
At the height of the crisis, it also adopted a rule allowing migrants to be forcibly returned to Belarus and ordered thousands of troops and police personnel to reinforce border guard patrols.
Activists and humanitarian organizations criticized these alleged “pushbacks” and the government’s overall severe anti-migration stance.
At least 20 individuals have perished at the Polish-Belarus border, where migrants and refugees—many of them were fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East—had to endure filthy, icy conditions during the winter.
However, following Russia’s invasion, Poland has thrown open its doors to Ukrainian refugees, letting more than four million to leave the nation thus far.
Ali, 32, was one of the asylum seekers. He left Syria at the end of last year after learning on social media that the simplest way to enter the EU was to fly to Belarus and then cross the border into Poland.
Ali, who is from a hamlet outside of Hama in western Syria, travelled to the Belarusian capital of Minsk and started looking for a forested area where he could enter the EU undetected.
This week, he told The Associated Press in Berlin, “I was looking for a place where I may live in safety, away from the oppression and misery back home.”
Ali, who hid his last name out of concern for his family’s safety, was unprepared for the danger and bitter cold that awaited him in the huge forests and wetlands.
In the woods, there were times when Ali confessed, “There were evenings when I went to sleep fearing I might not wake up again.”
“You are a hero if you give a refugee a ride to the Ukrainian border.” Natalia Gebert, the founder and CEO of Dom Otwarty, or Open House, a Polish non-profit organization that assists refugees, warned that if you do it at the Belarus border you are a smuggler and risk spending eight years in prison.
Prior to Belarus’s president Lukashenko urging would-be asylum seekers in the Middle East to travel to Minsk, the country has never been a major migration route into the EU.
People soon poured into Poland and the nearby countries of Lithuania and Latvia as well as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Africa.
Even though migration decreased in the winter, many still tried to enter the EU through Poland since that country was deemed to be less risky than the Mediterranean Sea, where many people have drowned in the past, according to Gebert.
When Sunni radicals found out Ali was an Alawite, they destroyed his modest makeup company in Syria. Ali claims Polish border guards forced him back six times.
But when it was winter, Belarusian guards assaulted him, took his money, and had him strip off everything. The guards forbade him from giving up and leaving for Minsk.
They screamed at him and the others, forced them to lie on the chilly ground, crept up behind them as a vicious dog barked, and repeatedly booted Ali in the chest.
He said that Polish border police agents damaged the SIM card in his phone. He spent days stuck in the bogs without food or drink.
In a study released last month, Human Rights Watch claimed that Poland “illegally, and occasionally forcefully, arbitrarily sweeps migrants and asylum-seekers back to Belarus, where they risk horrific abuses, including beatings and rape by border guards and other security personnel.”
Serious human rights violations have also been described by Amnesty International.
While some Poles agree with the government’s hard line, many border region inhabitants worked all winter and spring to rescue migrants stuck in the forest, some of whom needed medical attention.
Before he and others used pliers to break a breach in a border barrier, Ali spent 16 days in the jungles. He was given food and drink by some people, but soon after, he was hauled into custody by the police and transferred to a detention facility.
He passed through many closed camps over the course of the following three months.
He claimed that the guards used batons and stun guns and that they made the other prisoners strip in front of him before moving them to another camp. He was always referred to by his identification number rather than his name.
When he arrived at the Debak facility for foreigners in Otrebusy, southwest of Warsaw, in March, he was given his papers and ordered to leave and go to Germany.
Ali applied for asylum after arriving in Berlin in April. His story and those of other asylum seekers who claim to have experienced torture at the hands of Polish and Belarusian border guards have been documented by rights activists and psychologists.
“Here, I feel better. Once more, people address me by my name,’ Ali remarked. But I constantly worry that the Germans will deport me to Poland.