The Polish authorities officially launched on Tuesday the construction of a new fence on the border with Belarus to prevent illegal migrants from entering European soil.
The figures are certainly less impressive than in the fall, but even today, illegal migrants continue to cross the border between Belarus and Poland. A situation denounced for many months by Warsaw and theEuropean Union who accuse Minsk of having set up this new migratory route and of encouraging, or even orchestrating, this flow of migrants heading towards the eastern borders of Europe.
Poland has always refused help from Brussels, which offered to send the European agency Frontex to participate in the surveillance of this border. Warsaw wants to keep control of its border and has therefore decided to start work on the construction of a wall on Tuesday.
Concretely, it is a new fence with a metal barrier five meters high which will extend over more than 180 kilometers. The border between the two countries is 418 kilometers in total. The wall will be equipped with cameras and motion detectors, among other things, to help border guards prevent fraudulent crossings. It will cost some 353 million euros and should be completed in June.
The location of the work was not specified. ” The Belarusian services are only waiting for this to send groups of migrants there, so, for security reasons, the precise locations are not indicated. “said a spokeswoman for the Polish border guards.
The last primary forest in Europe
This construction raises concerns, especially among NGOs that help migrants. Because the latter will no longer be able to apply for asylum at all, since there will no longer be any way to cross this border even illegally.
Environmental activists are also worried, because the area concerned is a vast forest area considered one of the last or even the last primary forest in Europe and classified as a World Heritage Site by Unesco. Defenders of the environment fear the harmful effects of this construction for the fauna and flora in this forest, which is home to bison and wolves in particular.
A crisis between Warsaw and Minsk
Thousands of migrants, mostly from the Middle East, including Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon, but also from Afghanistan, tried last year to cross the Polish border to reach EU territory. Some made it through and more often than not they continued their journey to Western Europe.
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At the height of the crisis, Poland created a special zone at the border closed to humanitarian NGOs and the media, build barbed wire fences and sent several thousand soldiers to help the border guards. The latter were ordered to push the migrants back into Belarusian territory.
These measures, and the death from cold or starvation of a dozen migrants in Polish forests, have sparked a lively debate in Poland between supporters of the defense of the national border, which is also that of the EU, and human rights defenders. The latter claim for migrants the right to request asylum and not to be turned back while waiting for this request to be examined.
On Tuesday, border guards said they had recorded 17 illegal entries in the past 24 hours.
(With AFP)