Migrants gather at a transport and logistics centre near the Belarusian-Polish border in the Grodno region, Belarus, on Nov. 18.KACPER PEMPEL/Reuters
Belarus authorities on Thursday cleared the main camps where migrants had huddled at the border with Poland, in a change of tack that could cool a crisis that has spiralled in recent weeks into a major East-West confrontation.
The European Commission and Germany rejected a proposal by Belarus that European Union countries take in 2,000 of the migrants currently on its territory, however, and the United States accused Minsk of making migrants “pawns in its efforts to be disruptive”, signalling the tensions with the West were far from over.
Thousands of migrants had been trapped in freezing woods at the border.
European countries have for months accused Belarus of engineering the crisis by flying in migrants from the Middle East and pushing them to attempt to illegally cross its borders into Poland and Lithuania.
Minsk, backed by Moscow, rejects those accusations, but Lithuania’s president Gitanas Nauseda said the tough stance taken by the EU was paying off.
Iraqis check in for flight home after failing to enter EU from Belarus
“We are seeing the first results - the flights organised by the regime from the Middle East are being stopped, and migrants in Belarus are returning home,” he said after speaking with his Polish counterpart.
A spokesperson for the Polish border guard said the camps on the frontier in western Belarus were completely empty on Thursday, which a Belarusian press officer confirmed. A Reuters reporter saw the migrants were now in a warehouse inside Belarus.
“These camps are now empty, the migrants have been taken most likely to the transport-logistics centre, which is not far from the Bruzgi border crossing,” the Polish spokesperson said.
“There were no other such camps ... but there were groups appearing in other places trying to cross the border. We’ll see what happens in the next hours.”
In recent weeks, migrants have tried, mostly at night, to cross the frontier, sometimes clashing with Polish troops.
In a cruel illustration of the harsh conditions for those camped out, a couple, both injured, told the Polish Centre for International Aid, an NGO, on Thursday that their one-year-old child had died in the forest. At least eight more people are believed to have died at the border in recent months.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States had the authority to add to sanctions, telling reporters during a visit to Nigeria: “It is profoundly unconscionable that Lukashenko and Belarus have sought to weaponize migration.”
INTENSIFIED DIPLOMACY
The camp clearances came during a week of intensified diplomacy. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke by telephone twice to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, normally shunned by European leaders.
And Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday called on him to start a dialogue with his opponents - who swiftly rejected the idea unless Lukashenko freed political prisoners.
Belarus said Lukashenko had proposed a plan to Merkel to resolve the crisis, under which the EU would take in 2,000 people while Minsk would send home another 5,000.
German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer rejected the proposal and talked of misinformation.
“If we took in refugees, if we bowed to the pressure and said ‘we are taking refugees into European countries’, then this would mean implementing the very basis of this perfidious strategy,” Seehofer said in Warsaw.
A government source added that Germany had not agreed to any deal, stressing that this was a European problem.
Shortly before the plan was announced, the European Commission had said there could be no negotiation with Belarus over the plight of the migrants.
It declined to comment on the proposal, with a spokesperson saying: “We made our position very clear – this is an artificially created, state-orchestrated crisis and it is a responsibility of Lukashenko’s regime to stop it and to solve it.”
‘REALLY BAD PLACE’
Earlier on Thursday, in another potential sign of the crisis easing, hundreds of Iraqis checked in at a Minsk airport to fly back to Iraq, the first repatriation flight since August.
“I would not go back if it wasn’t for my wife,” a 30-year-old Iraqi Kurd who declined to give his name told Reuters. “She does not want to go back with me to the border, because she saw too many horrors over there.” The couple attempted to cross at least eight times from Belarus to Lithuania and Poland.
Belarusian state airline Belavia has meanwhile stopped allowing citizens from Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Yemen to board flights from Uzbekistan’s capital Tashkent to Minsk, Belta reported.
The EU has put diplomatic pressure on regional countries not to allow migrants to board flights for Belarus.
Before the border camp was cleared, migrants told Reuters how harsh conditions were there.
“Here it’s a really bad place for life, we are really cold, and we all are sick, especially the children. It is worst place for life,” Nermin, from Iraq, said.