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PUSZCZA BIAŁOWIESKA, Poland — The Polish government has no intention of making it easy for outsiders to poke around on the country’s border with Belarus — the scene of regular confrontations between Polish authorities and migrants trying to cross into the European Union.
The government locked down a 3-kilometer-wide strip running along the 400-kilometer frontier in September. The state of emergency bars anyone but locals, the police, border guards and the military from the area. That’s led to outrage from opposition politicians, journalists and NGOs, who accuse the authorities of illegally pushing back migrants into Belarus and refusing to process asylum applications.
That three-month state of emergency expired Tuesday, but the government raced a replacement measure through parliament while rejecting an effort by the opposition-controlled Senate to allow in journalists.
The provision went into effect Wednesday, applies for three months and “forbids staying in the area,” tweeted Interior Minister Mariusz Kamiński.
The reluctance to open up was clear when five members of the European Parliament, led by Poland’s Janina Ochojska from the European People’s Party, tried to enter the zone on Wednesday. They were stopped by border guards, who refused to let them pass.
“Nothing has changed, we practically still have the state of emergency,” said Ochojska. “This means that people will continue to freeze in the forests and there will be no access to them.”
The restrictions extend wider than the immediate zone. A bus carrying reporters accompanying the MEPs was stopped twice despite not being in the closed area.
The border crisis was sparked by Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko in retaliation against EU sanctions levied after a violent crackdown on opponents following last year’s disputed presidential election. Lukashenko has encouraged people to fly to Minsk from the Middle East, who have then been escorted to the borders with Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to try to enter the EU. It’s a policy the EU has denounced as a “hybrid attack.”
Thousands of people have managed to filter across the border and have ended up in Germany while about 2,000 are still on the Belarusian side of the frontier. The area is thinly populated with swamps and birch forests. As many as 12 people have died there in the effort to cross into the EU.
Poland has put up a border fence and is planning for a more permanent barrier. The Border Guard said there were 102 attempts to cross on Tuesday.
The exclusion zone makes it difficult to monitor what is happening on the border.
The new rules won’t make that easy either. Journalists can apply for permission to enter with the head of the Border Guard, but Poland’s government doesn’t have a media-friendly reputation. The Border Guard also plans to organize press tours.
The possibility of entering the zone will be purely “fictional,” said Joanna Klimowicz, a reporter with the pro-opposition Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. “We want to get to the forest in the zone where the people are, so we’ll need approval immediately. What will we do with an approval given the following day?”
Humanitarian workers were also dismayed at the decision to extend restrictions.
“It means for us that we cannot effectively help those who’re in the forest … and those people are going to freeze to death,” said Maria Złonkiewicz with Grupa Granica, an NGO operating near the border zone that tries to help migrants.
Dunja Mijatović, the commissioner for human rights with the Council of Europe, a human rights organization that is not part of the EU, said the new border zone measures will have “negative effects on the freedom of movement, assembly, and expression on Poland’s eastern border.”
“It is deeply concerning that under the new legislation, the journalists’ access to the border will be subjected to special permissions while access by humanitarian actors, providers of legal aid and human rights monitors is not explicitly guaranteed,” she said.
Source: Politico
