Last month, in a village in eastern Poland, I attended the funeral of an unborn boy. His mother, having abandoned Iraq with her husband and five children, miscarried while making the treacherous journey through the forests from Belarus. Light rain fell, an imam began to chant, and it took just one pallbearer to carry the tiny white coffin away. The Polish Muslim Tatar community has been resident in Europe for centuries, and their hilltop cemetery now hosts a handful of fresh graves of those who perished before their new life could even begin.
The gravely ill mother never recovered from her ordeal. On the same day as reports emerged of her death in a nearby hospital, Polish state TV broadcast a concert in honour of troops defending the country against the Belarusian regime’s “hybrid warfare”—exporting refugees to the Polish border. Cameras panned across fighter jets and helicopters next to ranks of smiling servicemen and servicewomen, some dancing with their children. Among the acts were former Ace of Base singer Jenny Berggren and Lou Bega, who thrusted and lip-synched his way through his 1999 hit, “Mambo Number 5.”
Until this year migrants rarely transited Belarus, which borders EU states Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Like many dictators in the EU’s orbit, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko had repeatedly threatened to “flood” Europe with migrants. This year, in response to Lukashenko rigging elections and brutalising opposition figures, Brussels hit Minsk with economic sanctions and Lukashenko duly carried out his threat. Belarusian intelligence operatives forged links with smuggling networks across the Middle East to enable thousands of migrants to fly direct to Minsk airport, from where they were ushered to the EU border.
“This is a hybrid attack, not a migration crisis,” said European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen. Over 10,000 asylum seekers have arrived in Germany via Belarus since the summer. A few have also made it to Calais to seek a dinghy bound for the UK. The British government is dispatching 140 military engineers to assist Poland with the construction of a razor-wire fence on its eastern border to keep more at bay.
In November, contrary to EU international law, Poland’s parliament passed legislation allowing collective expulsions of migrants back to Belarus. This is referred to as a “pushback,” an innocuous word that masks its violence. Greek and Croatian authorities are notorious practitioners. Rather than a formal return agreement between governments, men, women and children are dumped into the forest in freezing temperatures in the middle of the night. The bodies of at least 12 people have been found since the summer. More are expected.
Migrants spend weeks lost in this wilderness and become starving and hypothermic. One night, I accompanied activists into the forests after they received a mayday and GPS coordinates from two men. A fortnight ago, they had left the southern Syrian city of Sweida on a smuggler’s promise to reach Berlin in days. Twice in Poland they were forcibly returned to Belarus and beaten by security forces who were forcing migrants to cross back over the border and cajoling them to throw rocks at the Polish troops. When we found them, one trembled and stared in silence. The other, writhing with kidney pain, pleaded with us: “no Belarus, please no Belarus.”
“We know it’s an illegal way,” one said, “but we have the war in Syria for 10 years. And Assad stays in power. We tried to change it but…” He trailed off and pointed back at the country he had just traversed, under the iron-fisted rule of Lukashenko for nearly three decades. “It’s like Belarus.”
Polish activists try to stop this grim game of human ping-pong by applying for interim legal measures to prevent refugees being pushed back from Poland. It is a surreal sight: in the middle of the woods, hands and eyes poke out of thermal blankets to sign documents and give taped testimony that is then sent to the European Court of Human Rights. This, or to be spirited out of the country in a smuggler’s car, is now the only way to prevent a potential death.
The Bialowieza National Park that spans the Belarusian border is the last remaining part of the vast primeval forest that once covered Europe, famous for its roaming bison. It has been inaccessible for months since the Polish government demarcated a two-mile-wide “exclusion zone” running the 250-mile length of its eastern frontier. Journalists and humanitarian workers have been banned. Only residents remain, swept behind a curtain of police checkpoints, feeling as if they have been plunged into a warzone. Hotels and football grounds have been transformed into barracks.
Despite risking arrest, a clandestine network of locals are helping migrants running the gauntlet through the forest. Residents light green lanterns outside their homes, signifying a safe place. Volunteer firemen roam the undergrowth with parcels of food and clothes. Sympathetic doctors in hospitals secretly discharge migrants before the border guards can seize them. The good Samaritans are tireless, but traumatised. “Our forest was the place we can rest. And now it is a cemetery,” one man told me over coffee in his kitchen. “We have no place to escape, physically and mentally. We know there are people somewhere in the woods.”
The present-day refugees’ plight also has uncomfortable resonances in a region that once hosted one of the world’s largest Jewish populations. On the side of a house in the village of Narewka I found an exhibition commemorating “the neighbours who are no longer there.” Smiling residents pose for photos, unaware they would soon be rounded up by the Nazis and executed in the forest in 1942. Seventy years later military trucks rumble through the village, some laden with human cargo to be abandoned in the same forests.
