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The European Union and Poland blame the Belarusian regime for transporting thousands of migrants, mostly from the Middle East, and forcing them to cross the Community’s borders illegally. This policy is seen as Minsk’s revenge for the EU sanctions imposed on Belarus.
However, many Poles sympathize with the migrants caught between armed Belarusian border guards and Polish soldiers.
Some are demanding that they be allowed to enter EU territory and that they be allowed to apply for asylum, but others agree that the government must follow a strict line on Belarusian blackmail.
“Poland must protect its border,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said earlier this week, accusing the authoritarian Belarusian President Aliaksandr Lukashenko of using migrants.
“I really sympathize with migrants who are in a particularly difficult situation, but it must be made clear that they have become a political tool,” Morawieckis emphasized.
At the same time, the Prime Minister stressed that the Polish government is helping dozens of Afghans evacuated from Kabul to Warsaw in recent days by carrying out the necessary checks.
The clash near the village of Upper Usnažas is one of several similar incidents along the Belarusian border with Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.
All three countries no longer allow migrants trying to cross the border illegally and say they must go to their embassies in Minsk or an existing border crossing.
“Give them shelter”
In an area where the Polish-Belarusian border is not clearly marked, trapped migrants receive food and water from activists in Poland. Sometimes they also get help from the Polish border guards.
Several commenters asked the government to admit the group.
“The only thing we can do to show how we differ from … Minsk is to give them refuge and the opportunity to seek asylum,” commentator Boguslaw Chrabota wrote in the daily Rzeczpospolita.
Michal Wilgock, a critic of Gazeta Wyborcza, warned that the right-wing Polish government could use immigrant rhetoric to increase its popularity. She did the same in 2015, when she was elected to power.
Wilgock asked the political forces to “take sides”
However, some far-right camp actors supported a strong government line and visited that camp to express their support for the border guards.
Defense Deputy Minister Marcin Ociepa said on Friday that the incident should “become the basis for Poland to discuss key issues such as security or foreign migration policy.”
“The Polish opposition should not be part of this scenario of the Russian and Belarusian secret services,” he stressed.
The Polish Interior Ministry reported on Wednesday that 2.1 thousand people had tried to enter the country illegally since the beginning of August. people, of which 1,342 were reversed.
In another section of the border, services said on Friday they had rescued 12 migrants trapped in a swamp as they crossed the border.
There are three children in that group. Two people needed medical help, one had to be transported on a stretcher.
According to border guards, the group consists of 11 Iraqis and one Egyptian.
The Polish army sent around 900 soldiers to assist the border guards on patrol. Cut-wire fences are being built on various sections of the Belarusian border.
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