Photo credit: VICE
It was in the summer of 2021 that people from Somalia, Iraq, Syria, and other countries with ongoing conflicts began showing up in the Polish woods. Many had children with them. They entered at the Belarusian border, through perhaps the world’s most politically engineered migration trade route. Months earlier, Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Belarusian President, had diverted a plane carrying a journalist, triggering sanctions against him by the European Union. In response, ukashenko announced, “We stopped drugs and migrants. Now you will have to eat them and catch them yourselves.”
The Belarusian regime began advertising to people in high-conflict countries the promise of easy entry into the EU. On social media, state-run Belarusian tour agencies promoted enticing travel packages. One post offered pickup at the airport and a week in a hotel, promising that “you will feel safe.” Belarus also loosened its visa rules, lowered application fees for tourist visas for “hunting” or “spa” visits, and added flights on the state airline to Minsk, the capital. Migrants quickly appeared at Belarus’s borders with Latvia and Lithuania, and, in the greatest numbers, with Poland. When Poland constructed a barbed wire fence at the border, Belarusian guards reportedly gave migrants wire cutters.
In August 2021, thirty-two Afghans who had fled their country just before the Tsliban took over arrived at the border, hoping to claim asylum. Poland refused to process tem. So the Afghans, stranded, sat in a muddy no man’s land, flanked by armed border guards on both sides. Technically, they were already in Poland, in a tiny village called Usnarz Gorny. There was no fence there, so locals and journalists could interact with the refugees. Images of an Afghan woman camped out with a gray cat went viral. The European Court of Human Rights soon ordered Poland to give the migrants assistance and temporary shelter.
Within weeks, Poland announced a state of emergency and closed areas near the border to medics, humanitarian workers and reporters among others.
The weather in the forest cooled, and rain set in. The Afghans were sleeping on the ground. That September, Poland’s interior minister held a press conference in which he displayed a photo, purportedly of a man having sex with a cow, and claimed that it had been discovered on a device confiscated from a migrant.
In October, migrants attempted more than ten thousand crossings and Poland passed a law effectively legalizing “pushbacks.” In a pushback, authorities force migrants back across the border immediately after they arrive, often violently, without considering asylum claims or other needs. The law appeared to violate EU and international law’s principle of non-refoulement, which forbids returning people to places where they face threats to their life or freedom. The Afghans would clearly be in danger if sent home. Even if they were returned only to Belarus, they would be at risk: border guards there regularly beat migrants who failed to complete the journey to Poland. Yet Poland pushed back the thirty-two Afghans, including a fifteen-year-old girl, arguing that they had remained outside Polish jurisdiction the whole time, so non-refoulement didn’t apply.
The next month, hundreds of desperate and marooned migrants, freezing in makeshift encampments on the Belarusian side of the border, tried to break through the barbed-wire fence to Poland. Polish border guards responded with tear gas and water cannons.
Since 2021, Poland has built the permanent border wall that Ahmed crossed, razor-wire fences stand on both sides of it. Thousands of security officers are now stationed there, along with cameras, thermal and motion sensors, night vision devices, and other surveillance tools.
In fairy tales, the forest represents both refuge and danger – a site of respite or place where you might be devoured whole. During the Holocaust, many Jews hid in the Bialowieza Forest, constructing shelters from natural materials or hunkering down in swamps.
In recent years, according to a Polish humanitarian collective called We Are Monitoring, more than a hundred people have died crossing from Belarus to Poland, mostly owing to hypothermia or exhaustion. The true number is likely higher, since the government is not closely tracking the situation; nonprofit groups have tried to fill the void.
