Fears that the authoritarian leader of Belarus is using migrants as a “hybrid warfare” tactic to undermine the security of the EU are putting new strains on some of the values and laws in the 27-nation bloc.
The crisis at the eastern frontiers of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia is fueling calls for the EU to finance the construction of something it never wanted to build: fences and walls at the border.
This idea was voiced this week at a ceremony commemorating the fall of one of Europe’s most notorious and historic barriers, the Berlin Wall.
Photo: AFP
The border crisis with Belarus has been simmering for months. Top EU officials say that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, angered by EU sanctions imposed on his regime after a crackdown on internal dissent following a disputed election last year, is luring thousands of migrants to the capital, Minsk, with the promise of help to get to western Europe. Belarus denies it is using them as pawns.
The crisis came to a head after large groups of migrants gathered at a border crossing with Belarus near Kuznica, Poland. Warsaw bolstered security there, sending in riot police to turn back those who tried to cut through a razor-wire fence.
Polish lawmakers introduced a state of emergency and changed the country’s asylum laws. Only troops have access to the area, to the dismay of refugee agencies and Poland’s EU partners. Lithuania is taking similar measures and has begun extending its border fence.
The EU’s executive branch, the European Commission, believes walls and barriers are ineffective, and has so far resisted calls to fund them, although it will pay for infrastructure such as surveillance cameras and equipment.
In the heightened security climate, that attitude might be changing.
“We are facing a brutal, hybrid attack on our EU borders. Belarus is weaponizing migrants’ distress in a cynical and shocking way,” European Council President Charles Michel said at an event in Germany on Tuesday, the 32nd anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“We have opened the debate on the EU financing of physical border infrastructure. This must be settled rapidly because Polish and Baltic borders are EU borders. One for all and all for one,” Michel said.
That approach and other border tactics are sowing dismay.
Addressing EU lawmakers on Wednesday, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi called for European leadership and appealed to the bloc to avoid “a race to the bottom” on migration policy.
“These challenges simply do not justify the knee-jerk reaction we have seen in some places; the irresponsible xenophobic discourse; the walls and barbed wire; the violent pushbacks that include the beating of refugees and migrants, sometimes stripping them naked and dumping them in rivers, or leaving them to drown in seas; the attempts to evade asylum obligations by paying other states to take on one’s own responsibilities,” Grandi said.
“The European Union, a union based on rule of law, should and can do better,” he said.
About 8,000 migrants have entered from Belarus this year, and border guards have prevented about 28,000 attempted crossings, commission data show.
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