Lithuania on Friday announced that it would build a border wall with Belarus to stem the flow of migrants from Africa and the Middle East arriving from the ex-Soviet country.
So far this year, Lithuanian border guards have detained more than 1,500 migrants arriving from Belarus, compared with 81 for all of last year.
On Friday, the military of the Baltic country, a EU and NATO member, started to put up a barbed wire on the border to deter asylum seekers, most of whom are from the Middle East and Africa.
Photo: Reuters
“The first stage is a barbed wire fence. In the second stage, we will go ahead with the construction of a physical fence,” Lithuanian Minister of the Interior Agne Bilotaite said, laying out plans for a 550km border wall.
Tensions between Minsk and Vilnius soared last year after Lithuania became a hub for the Belarusian opposition, following a disputed presidential election.
Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya fled to Lithuania after claiming to have defeated Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko in the ballot on Aug. 9 last year, which critics say was rigged in his favor.
The Lithuanian border guards on Friday said that they had detained 37 migrants over the past 24 hours.
A nation of 2.8 million, Lithuania is struggling to accommodate the unprecedented spike. It has so far failed to send any of the new arrivals back to Belarus.
The Lithuanian military is expanding tent camps set up to accommodate the migrants.
Minsk last month said that it was suspending its participation in the Eastern Partnership, an initiative to boost ties between the EU and its former Soviet Union neighbous, after Brussels imposed new sanctions over the forced landing of a European flight.
The Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the time said that the suspension of the agreement would have a “negative impact” on fighting illegal migration and organized crime, as Belarus shares a border with EU members Poland and Lithuania.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
RSS