Europe is as guilty of the Polish-Belarussian border situation as Lukashenko
Note: This is about events almost two years ago. I’m transferring to Substack a few things I wrote before I started this blog. This was originally published on LinkedIn on November 14, 2021.
This is an entirely deliberate, constructed “migrant crisis”. Because when it comes to blackmail, it takes two to tango: on the one side the blackmailer, Lukashenko, who is copying, on a smaller scale, Erdogan’s 2015/16 move of extorting billions of euros from the EU for halting the flow of refugees to Europe. That didn’t take much original thinking nor criminal genius. And on the other side, the guilty blackmail victim, who has a desperate need to hide his shame – and that’s Europe. The EU, as has been pointed out in a thankfully growing number of commentary, has for years paid billions to leaders at least as unsavory as Lukashenko, in places like Libya, to stop migrant flows, which the latter do with violent zeal. European governments have largely succeeded in keeping this ugly, bloody truth out of the media.
The situation on the Belarusian border, however, is all over the news and so is Europe’s reading of it: by forcing human beings to freeze, starve, get sick and die from exposure in a swampy forest, stuck between guns and razor wire, we are “defending democracy, freedom and human rights” (see screenshot - I will not post a live link to such dribble - of today’s opinion piece by UK’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, standing in for many more disgraceful pronouncements of this kind). This is no longer just hypocrisy and politicians’ double-talk. This is 1984-style Newspeak.
Polish and Baltic politicians, but also leaders of the Belarusian opposition movement have referred to the migrants as “terrorists”, “hybrid war” and even “hybrid warriors”, with dehumanizing terms like “flood”, “wave”, “threat” and have exploited vile racist and Islamophobic tropes.
The Belarusian opposition, pro-democracy movement has been clamoring for Europe to accept Belarusians fleeing repression, for visas, humanitarian access, work permits, asylum, while simultaneously stoking panic and fear among their European target audiences about the Middle Eastern migrants camping at the border. The racism and double standard of this position and how it conflicts with an ostensible commitment to democracy, rule of law and human rights doesn’t seem to occur to them. Many of the European cheerleaders of the Belarusian pro-democracy movement are guilty of the same hypocrisy.
The EU, as if to spiral even further into these contradictions, heralds Poland’s militarist response and throws money at it, while at the same time sanctioning Poland for not complying with EU rule of law standards. The cognitive dissonance should make their heads explode.
What makes Europe such a perfect victim of blackmail? Its panicky fear of migrants. Or to be perfectly accurate, not even of the migrants themselves, but of the marginal losses in elections to mainstream parties at the expense of the populist far-right. Across old and new Europe, politicians know that images of throngs of humans crossing a border will shave a few points off the top in the next election – and that might cost them their majority. They will do everything they can to avoid that: break their own and international law, mobilize vast amounts of money, outsource mass human rights violations to mercenaries at the periphery and render themselves hostages to the likes of Erdogan and Lukashenko.
All the actors have come out looking terrible: First Lukashenko, naturally. Let’s be quite clear, though. Handing out a few thousand visas to Middle Easterners and bussing them to the border, even if done in bad faith and with no regard for these migrants’ well-being, pales in comparison to the mass repression, the large-scale torture, the imprisonment of political opponents etc that Lukashenko is guilty of. This isn’t even close to the worst thing he has ever done.
Poland – first and foremost for its policy of refusing to accept any asylum-seekers and shuttering its asylum system, in stark violation of its obligations under international and EU law, all justified with racist and Islamophobic fear-mongering and without a trace of shame. The rest of the EU, for being so easily blackmailed by the specter of just thousands of migrants. The Belarusian pro-democracy movement for not acting in the spirit of its avowed principles of rule of law, human rights and democracy and showing solidarity with Middle Eastern migrants, when so many of them claim shelter and protection in Europe. The political establishment and commentariat across Europe, pontificating about how “standing firm” against “hybrid war” was part of the fight for democracy and human rights, deliberately silent about how under our laws, when a human being walks up to our borders and asks for asylum, we are obliged to accept him until his request has been given an appropriate hearing.
All of this could have been avoided. When, in summer, it first became clear that a conspicuously growing number of Middle Eastern asylum-seekers was appearing at the Polish and Lithuanian borders and that the Belarusian state was likely behind this, Europe should have called Lukashenko’s bluff right then and there. The migrants should have been quickly and quietly accepted, ideally distributed across several reception countries and their asylum requests recorded and heard. No big deal. It’s the law, after all. We do it every day, all over the continent, without making a fuss.
Chances are, some of the asylum-seekers would eventually have been found not eligible for asylum and returned to their countries. Reporting by international journalists embedded with the migrants indicates that some may not exactly have a “well-founded fear of persecution”. And that, too, is nothing out of the ordinary, that’s what the asylum process is for. If that had happened in summer, if Poland, Lithuanian, Germany and the rest of the EU had done no more and no less than comply with their own laws, Lukashenko would have been forced to conclude that this is one button he cannot push. That we can’t be blackmailed, because we have nothing to be ashamed and afraid of. It would have pulled the rug out from under his shabby scheme, and the flow of migrants would have soon reverted to its usual trickle.
Instead, Europe chose hype, racism, xenophobia, militarism and lawlessness. And here we are, with soldiers staring at each other across a razor-wired border, squeezing freezing, starving migrants between them, in a grey zone to which journalists and humanitarian agencies are denied access. Well done us.