The Promised Land

PISMO’S LENS

The Promised Land

text/photos BARTEK SABELA

7.08.2024

The morning mists on the borderlands.

In the dispute over the shape of Polish and European migration policy, people’s stories are lost. We still know little about where migrants come from, what they have experienced, and what drove them on their perilous journey. We do not know what happens to those who have succeeded.

“Is it safe?” I ask a trusted guide living in Erbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdistan Region in Iraq, at the end of January.

“Very safe, my friend, we’ve seen no drones, no missiles in ten days, very safe,” he answers confidently, and I remind myself that safety is a relative thing and that one can get used to anything.

On January 15 of that year, Iranian ballistic missiles rained down on the city, killing four civilians and wounding six. The next day, drones launched by Iranian-backed Shiite militias targeted Erbil international airport. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been bombing Kurdish cities for years.

“Were there any kidnappings?” I ask.

“Only two last week,” he replies calmly. “But they were local activists, and they were let go a day later, don’t worry.”

Umed

Umed Ahmed in Wolverhampton, January 2024.

The house is completely empty, shabby walls with peeling plaster and floors lined with old carpets. Instead of doors, there are drapes or plastic curtains. Electric cables are strewn upon the walls, a fluorescent lamp dangling from the ceiling, illuminating the interior with an unpleasant, cold light. A Turkish soap opera about love is playing on the TV, an elderly woman watching. Her daughter, Qaniha, lights the gas stove, brews tea, and adds copious sugar. Twelve-year-old Hama, the woman’s son, sits next to me on the kitchen floor.

“It was a decision that had been in the air for a long time,” Qaniha recalls. “We had talked about it many times. There was no other way. Now I am a woman without a husband, without any means of subsistence. That’s difficult in our culture.”

“Why didn’t you leave together?” I ask.

“Because we didn’t have enough money,” she answers without hesitation. “Our store went out of business a long time ago, the authorities made it difficult for us to run it, intimidated our customers. I couldn’t find a job anywhere because I’m his wife. For a long time, we were staying afloat thanks to the help of our family. My husband Umed’s trip cost $7,000.”

Relatives and friends chipped in. The average salary in Erbil today is the equivalent of a little over $300; that was not enough for three people. Umed Ahmed fled Kurdistan in the fall of 2021. A few weeks earlier, he received the final threats. A voice on the phone said that they would cut out his tongue and rape his wife in front of his son. Over the years, Umed had become accustomed to threats, downplaying them, hiding them from his wife and brothers. But this time, people sympathetic to Umed working in the government administration warned the family that jokes were over.

Qaniha and Hama, Umed’s wife and son, in their home in Erbil.

Umed has given them reasons to hate him. For over twenty years, he has been openly talking about corruption, speaking for the people who were arrested, beaten, kidnapped, and murdered. He is brave, uncompromising, and his weapon is poetry. He writes about freedom, about human rights, about democracy, about politics. He hand-copied his first poems onto dozens of small slips of paper and scattered them from a bus in downtown Erbil. At that time, hardly anyone picked them up. Then he organized protests and demonstrations, during which he read his revolutionary verses through a loudspeaker. The group of protesters was always small, sometimes Umed stood alone in the street, but it did not bother him. Over time, he became recognizable in the city, published poems on Facebook and YouTube, often gave interviews at protests, and appeared on television. He was not discouraged by the increasingly frequent visits of the police at his home, his parents’, his sisters’, and brothers’. Threats, beatings, and further arrests did not deter him. He was insolent, called a spade a spade, and was not afraid to say who was to blame for the situation in Kurdistan – it was Massoud Barzani, the former president of Kurdistan (2005-2017).

The main square of Erbil as seen from the walls of the citadel.

After the civil war in the 1990s, Iraqi Kurdistan was divided between two rival clans. The south is under the control of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the family of Jalal Talabani, head of the PUK in 1975-2017 and former president; the northern part is ruled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of the Barzani clan. Over the decades, the Barzani family has de facto privatized the autonomous Kurdistan Region both politically and economically. The president today is Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister is Masrour Barzani. The army is headed by Mansour Barzani, and the main commanders of the Peshmerga (Kurdistan Army) are Rawan Barzani, Waisi Barzani, and Sirwan Barzani. The latter is also the president of Korek Telecom, the largest telecommunications network in Kurdistan. According to reports by Transparency International (an international corruption watchdog), the family also controls state-owned companies and the largest private enterprises. Masud Barzani remains the doyen of the family and the president of the KDP.

The Iraqi Kurdistan Region has always been one of the most important allies of the West in the Middle East. The Kurdish Peshmerga played an important role in the West’s wars against Saddam Hussein and the Islamic State. Kurdistan also has considerable oil reserves. Nevertheless, according to Grupa Granica [a social movement that opposes how authorities have responded to the migration crisis on the border with Belarus – translator’s note], it is the Iraqi Kurds who are one of the main groups of migrants on the Polish-Belarusian border. Why? Corruption, nepotism, unemployment, lack of social infrastructure – I hear from all the Kurds I talk to. In 2023, Iraq was ranked 154th on Transparency International’s corruption survey.

The arrests of journalists and activists in Kurdistan are a daily occurrence. According to the Kurdish organization Metro Center for Journalists’ Rights and Advocacy, there were 249 legal violations against journalists in 2023. The year before, there were 431.

Detentions of journalists and activists in Kurdistan are a daily occurrence. According to the Kurdish organization Metro Center for Journalists’ Rights and Advocacy, there were 249 illegal acts committed against journalists in 2023. A year earlier, there were 431 such incidents. These are mainly threats, beatings, attacks on homes and editorial offices, arrests, torture. However, the detainees sometimes disappear or are murdered. Despite this, Kurdistan is considered to be the safest and most stable region of Iraq.

“Even now, when Umed has left, we still live in constant fear,” says Qaniha. “We don’t have a house of our own, we live with our parents, sometimes with our brother. We move between houses in the evenings so as not to draw attention to ourselves. Mostly, we are afraid that they would kidnap Hama, because he is an easy target. We have been trying for a child for twelve years, he is our only son. I can’t send him to the market, not even to the playground to play football. Besides, Hama has no friends, because he hardly leaves the house, doesn’t go to school. Who will give us back the lost time? I keep imagining that we are all together. In a safe place.”

The last time Hama saw his father was three years ago.

Hama interprets for us. He is excited that we can talk in English. He has learned on his own, from computer games and YouTube videos. His pronunciation is perfect, with a smooth British accent. He also reads English, and is now learning to write. He says that it is only a matter of focus and time. And he has a lot of it. Hama takes out his phone and dials a number. His father’s face appears on the screen, he is walking down the street somewhere in a British city thousands of kilometres away.

“It’s been three years since I last saw him,” Hama says. “We talk every day, but I would love to hug him. I dream of going to join him, even if it would be dangerous. Dad says that maybe in a year, maybe in a year and a half it will be possible.”

“I was the one who persuaded Umed to leave,” Rebaz, his younger brother, joins the conversation. “He insisted on staying. But I knew that Umed was wanted by Asayîş, the secret police. When they come for you, you disappear without a trace. I had already driven four brothers to the airport in Sulaymaniyah. We always smile, pat each other on the back, assure one another that everything will be fine and that we will see each other again soon. But each time I have the feeling that this is the last time I see them.”

The experience of migration is nothing new for Umed’s family. They come from a small town in the mountains on the border of Iraq and Iran. Kurdish villages were wantonly bombed not only by Saddam Hussein, but also by his predecessor Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. In 1974, bombs forced the family to flee to Iran. They came back after two years, they rebuilt the house. Then more bombs fell, and the inhabitants of the border villages were resettled to the suburbs of Erbil to cut off support for the Peshmerga fighting against government troops. They came back again. In the 1990s, the mountains became the arena of a struggle between Barzani’s peshmerga and Talabani’s peshmerga. More bombs fell on the villages. In 1996, Erbil was taken by Barzani’s troops. The family was exiled again because one of the brothers is a Talabani soldier.

In 2015, the youngest of the brothers, Rebin, escaped from Kurdistan. He is a writer; in his four books he criticized not only religious radicalism, but the concept of religion as such, and the status of the mullahs. Through Turkey, he got to one of the Greek islands, and then on to Germany along the Balkan route [a migration route leading to Western Europe through the Balkan countries – editor’s note]. He lives in Hamburg. Two other brothers also set off through Turkey, but they were not so lucky, they had to turn back. They are waiting for the next opportunity.

In the spring of 2021, the Belarusian airlines Belavia opened new connections between Minsk and the Middle East countries. In Baghdad, Erbil, Damascus, Cairo, Istanbul, travel agencies sprouted up, offering attractive tourist trips to Belarus. The program offered sightseeing in the city, Belarusian visa included. Soon, connections to Moscow also appeared, and Russian universities were extremely eager to accept students from Africa and the Middle East. The Belarusian regime lifted penalties for illegal stay in the border area, and also suspended the implementation of the readmission agreement with the European Union. (It guaranteed that Belarus would take back migrants crossing from its territory to EU countries; it was suspended by Alexander Lukashenko in October 2021).

In the first weeks, migrants headed mainly towards Lithuania and Latvia. A state of emergency was introduced in both countries at the beginning of July (in Latvia, only in the border area). At the beginning of August, groups of migrants also appeared on the Polish border. On August 17, the Polish Government Information Centre reported that 1,935 people have tried to cross the border that month. They were mainly citizens of Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. On September 2, Poland introduced a state of emergency in 183 border townships, and on October14, with the votes of Law and Justice (PiS) and Confederation (Konfederacja), the Sejm adopted amendments to the Act on Foreigners, legalising immediate pushback of migrants across the Polish border, even if they wanted to apply for international protection. Similar regulations were already in place in Lithuania and Latvia.

Under the new law, a group of Afghans, who have been camping for seventy-one days in the strip between the Belarusian and Polish border installations near the village of Usnarz Dolny, are deported to Belarus. On June 30, 2022, the Border Guard informs that the construction of the barrier on the border is coming to an end. The steel wall is over 180 kilometres long, 5.5 meters high, and topped with coils of razor wire. It is not true that it stands right on the border line. A metre, sometimes even a few metres beyond it, it is still Poland and Polish law is in force, and the people staying there are on our territory.

The first confirmed fatality at the border is twenty-nine-year-old Iraqi Ahmed Hamid. He died of hypothermia, and on September 19, the border guards found his body in the forest near the village of Frącki in the Sejny district. He left a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter in Iraq.

According to the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (HFPC), since the start of the migration crisis at the Poland-Belarus border, 350 people have gone missing and 82 have died. However, these figures only represent the cases we are aware of. Data from the Belarusian side is unknown.

Wall on the Poland-Belarus border.

It is Rebaz who organizes Umed’s entire journey. He contacts the “travel agency” in Erbil, takes care of the formalities, raises the money, and finally drives him to the airport. But not to Erbil, it’s too dangerous there. They are going to Sulaymaniyah. From there, Umed flies to Dubai. His brother even guides him through the airport: here are the toilets, there are the gates, go right here and all the way down the corridor. Rebaz sets up two WhatsApp groups: one for the whole family, the other just for himself and his brother.

Umed reaches the Polish-Belarusian border at the end of October 2021, as the first frosts can already be felt in the forest. At that time, there is no wall yet, but there is a state of emergency in the border zone. It takes Umed exactly a month to cross the border. The Belarusian army sometimes helps, gives equipment, drives him to the border; other times, they beat him mercilessly. In a migrant camp near Hrodna, Belarusians put on a propaganda show, forcing people to shout “Long live Belarus, long live Lukashenko!”. The images are broadcast around the world, while the army transports people to the Lithuanian border. Umed begins to understand that while escaping from one dictator, he ended up in the hands of another.

After three weeks, Poland is finally within reach! But his joy is premature: at the agreed spot, instead of a smuggler, they encounter the army. Umed thinks he is saved. Instead, he is driven back to Belarus. The forest is sprinkled with winter’s first snow. Umed lights a fire, then calls his brother. He says he is sorry and that he doesn’t know if he will be able to survive the night. “Tell our family that everything is fine. I’m in Europe, after all.”

In the morning, Belarusians find him and take him to a large camp with about a hundred other people, including women and families with children. At noon, they bring food; a queue of shivering, starving people lines up in front of the truck. But it’s just water and hard, spoiled bread – canned food costs an arm and a leg. In the evening, the Belarusians announce an ultimatum: Poland or deportation.

In the evening, by bobbing flashlights, the soldiers yell as they pack people onto trucks, the children cry. This time the ride is long, Umed fears that they are on the way back to Lithuania. There are legends about the cruelty of Lithuanian border guards, spread by Belarusian guards and Lukashenko’s regime media. And on top of that, the terrain is difficult, including swamps and the Nemunas River. To their relief, it’s Poland. At night, they hear drones flying in the distance, otherwise all is quiet. But as the migrants pass over planks above the barbed wire, a Polish patrol suddenly appears. The Belarusians lay into the Poles with pepper spray, there is chaos, screams. Belarusian soldiers push Umed to the Polish side, he runs as fast as he can into the forest, catching up with a group of young Kurds from Syria. He asks them to wait, but they refuse.

But Umed is lucky. Although in the forest everyone is on their own, his journey is supported and tracked by his whole family. In Erbil, Rebaz spends his days and nights on Google Earth, working out the topography of the terrain, analysing the network of roads and paths, watching hundreds of photos and videos. He works out where there is less of a chance of encountering patrols of the Border Guard and the army. He draws arrows in the screenshot maps and sends them to Umed with simple instructions: 200 meters west until you see a small hill, then turn south. Rebaz literally leads his brother step by step through the forest. He has already established contact with Grupa Granica. One of the activists, Małgorzata Rycharska, has been in contact with Umed and Rebaz for several days, sending instructions on how to behave, how to move, analysing what Umed sees around him. Only Rebaz and Rycharska know of Umed’s exact situation.

“None of us slept when my dad was walking across the border,” Hama recalls. “But only later did we find out that Rebaz was not telling us everything. And it was very wise of him.”

Umed’s journey takes its toll on the whole family. His wife is diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome. The cause – long-term stress and anxiety, lack of sleep. Umed’s sister, Xanda, develops insomnia, anxiety, takes psychotropic drugs.

“The worst thing was when he would suddenly disappear for hours,” says Rebaz. “Every time, the first thought was that he was caught or he died. Umed uses his smartphone like dumbphone. He does not know how to use applications or maps. I only taught him how to send a live location. Once I didn’t sleep for more than thirty hours; he was already in Poland at that time. He wrote to me he felt that he was going to die there, that he could not get up. Then my wife took the phone and texted him to eat leaves, moss, whatever.”

After two days of marching, Umed sees the forest edge. There is a road and lights in the houses beyond. It is Sutno in the municipality of Mielnik. He hides in the bushes, waits. At night, a group of activists finds him, they bring him warm clothes, food, water. At the same time, other activists are filling out an application to the Court in Strasbourg for an interim measure. This decision, which is usually received overnight, theoretically obliges the authorities of a given country to temporarily suspend the return of the foreigner to the country from which he or she entered, until court proceedings can be held.

With the document in-hand, in the presence of activists, lit by the cameras from Polsat and TVN, on November 23, 2021, Umed leaves the forest. Under such circumstances, it would be awkward to just expel him back to Belarus. The Border Guard take him to an outpost in Połowce. There is a hearing on international protection. However, it turns out that the interpreter hired by the Border Guard is a man working with the Kurdistan Regional Government Representation in Poland. When Umed explains why he fled Kurdistan, veiled threats are made. A week later, Umed is transported to the Guarded Centre for Foreigners in Białystok, after three weeks he is sent to another one in Wędrzyn.

Umed’s family: from left to right, son Hama, sister Xanda, Umed’s parents, wife Qaniha with their son Hama, and brother Rebaz.

According to the Act on Foreigners, the procedure is simple: when crossing the border, it is enough to report the intention to apply for international protection to the Border Guard officers. The application is sent to the Office for Foreigners, which has six months to render its decision. During this time, the applicant is placed in an open centre for foreigners and receives a temporary identity certificate confirming their legal stay in Poland. They cannot be legally employed for six months but have access to education and health care services.

If a person submits an asylum application in Poland, they should remain in the country until the procedure is completed. When protection is granted, they can take advantage of a one-year integration program, including financial support, job placement assistance, and a Polish language course, among other things. International protection is granted indefinitely. After five years from obtaining protection, you can apply for a permanent residence permit, and after two more years – for citizenship.

If the decision is negative, the foreigner has thirty days to leave Poland. However, they can appeal the decision to the Provincial Administrative Court or submit a new application for protection, but this must be done at a Border Guard post, thus revealing that they are in the country illegally. The Border Guard should accept the application, but at the same time they can start the return commitment procedure.

“Often, they just don’t do it,” notes Aleksandra Pulchny from the Association for Legal Intervention, “sometimes they act only after a number of requests. It happens that the return commitment procedure is conducted in parallel with the one for obtaining international protection.”

“So, a stay in Poland on this basis can be extended indefinitely?”

“Sometimes it takes a very long time, but there are situations when a person receives a negative decision, they leave Poland, and apply for protection in another European country.”

This is because recognition of applications in Poland is significantly below the European average. The highest chances of getting international protection are afforded to citizens of Syria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Deportations to countries affected by armed conflicts are outlawed under the European Convention on Human Rights. The principle of non-refoulement is also enshrined in the 1951 Geneva Convention. However, in the statistics of the Office for Foreigners, I see few applications from citizens of these countries, despite the fact that they constitute the bulk of migrants by nationality.

“That is due to the fact Poland simply refuses access to the asylum procedure,” says Pulchny. “Despite clear declarations of intent to seek protection, people are being pushed back to Belarus.”

Poland had been violating the right of access to the asylum procedure even before. Between 2015 and 2017, applications from Chechen citizens were refused en masse at the border crossings in Terespol and Brześć. Some approached the border many times. In 2017, several dozen cases were brought to the Provincial Administrative Court in Warsaw, about half of which were resolved in favour of the migrants. In July 2020, Poland also lost cases before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which found that the Border Guard’s widespread refusal to accept applications violated four articles of the European Convention on Human Rights. The ECtHR’s judgment did not refer only to this particular case, and its proper implementation should result in a change of the Border Guard’s practices. However, this did not happen. Repeated attempts to cross the border continue in the current version of the migration crisis as well. Despite having exit visas from Belarus and declarations needed to submit asylum applications in Poland, people are still returned to Belarus. In July 2021, the ECtHR issued the same judgment in the case of three Syrian citizens. The ruling again failed to bring about a change in the procedures of the Border Guard.

However, if asylum applications are accepted by Border Guard officers, even in the presence of activists, it does not guarantee safety either. Four boys from Somalia found this out in May 2024 – after their applications and powers of attorney were accepted, they were sent back to Belarus. However, if a foreigner crossed the border irregularly, got lucky, and was not deported to Belarus, they will almost inevitably end up in a closed centre, especially if they do not have their documents. To confirm identity and “secure the proceedings”.

“Detention, which should be the last resort, is a regular practice in our country,” bemoans Pulchny. “Whereas there is a whole group of people who should never be sent to closed centres: children, victims of violence and persecution, people whose stay could endanger their life and health. In the centres, they are retraumatized, they do not have adequate psychological and medical help. For a long time, independent psychologists have not been allowed to enter guarded centres. When a suicide attempt occurs, instead of being released from the centre, the person is often placed in isolation or a jail cell, or returns to the centre after hospitalization.”

Wall on the Poland-Belarus border.

In June 2023, the Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment and awarded compensation in the case of a single mother who spent nearly a year and a half in a closed centre with her child. The court emphasised that detention is the ultima ratio (last resort) and in other cases is unjust, its application in itself undermining the humanitarian rationale of granting international protection.

Umed is forty-six, with a naturally smiling face. I like him immediately when I meet him in early 2024 in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, England. He beams when he sees me like I were a family member, while in reality we had only talked a few times on WhatsApp before. Umed shares a house with a few other Kurds, his tiny room has a bed, a chair, and an electric heater, a small window to the courtyard gives little light, a small shelf holds only the Koran.
“When we arrived at the camp, they stripped us naked, ordered us to do squats, took away phones and documents,” Umed says. “It was a normal prison, wires all around, soldiers.”

Wędrzyn is a temporary centre established at an active military unit near Gorzów Wielkopolski. In the fall of 2021, more than 600 men were held there, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. According to the Law on Foreigners, men, women, and even children can be detained in closed centres, despite the fact that the detention of minors is against international law. In cells in Wędrzyn, twenty or more people are placed in an area of 8 square meters. The standard in penitentiary units in Poland is 3 square meters per person, in Europe – 4 square meters. Overcrowding, violence, omnipresent stench, lack of privacy or psychological care, no activities, no contact with the outside world. On top of that, the constant roar of tanks, helicopters, and explosions from the nearby training ground. In the autumn, the first suicide attempts happen, followed by a rebellion and a hunger strike.
“I knew from talking to the lawyer that I was unlikely to be deported, but I didn’t know how long I would be there.”

After reports on TV, an intervention by Amnesty International, and a visit of Dr. Hanna Machińska, Deputy Commissioner for Human Rights, and Przemysław Kazimirski, Director of the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture, some of the inmates are transferred to other centres, and in autumn of 2022, Wędrzyn is closed.

Umed ends up in Lesznowola. Although it is also a closed centre, the standard is completely different. A four-person cell, clean, with better food. Only one thing remains the same: no one knows how long they would be languishing here. In April, five Syrian Kurds go on hunger strike for the first time, more follow.

As the website of the Office for Foreigners reads, “A foreigner is granted international protection (in the form of refugee status or subsidiary protection) if he or she is threatened with persecution or a real risk of loss of life or health in their country of origin.” Umed Ahmed is one of 1400 Iraqi nationals who applied for asylum in 2021. The office does not provide information on how many of them are Kurds. In 2021, 99.4 percent of Iraqi applications were dismissed or rejected. Poland apparently considers Iraq a safe country.

In 2023, 9,513 applications for international protection were submitted in Poland, of which as many as 7,250 came from citizens of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. For comparison, in the entire European Union (EU), as many as 1,048,880 applications for protection were submitted in 2023, more than 20 percent more than in the previous year. Two-thirds of the requests came from citizens of Syria and Afghanistan.

At the end of May 2022, Umed is released from Lesznowola and transferred to an open centre in Linin. After a few days, unsure of his situation in Poland, he escapes to Germany and surrenders to the police there. However, during the second interview with the German police, he learns that there is a risk he will be deported to Poland under the Dublin procedure (which stipulates that only one EU country conducts an asylum application, usually the one whose border the foreigner crossed first). And from Poland, he could be returned to the country of origin, if it is considered “safe” (2,463 people were deported in 2021–2023; Iraqis were one of the largest groups.) Umed has only one way out: Great Britain.

“We waited ten days in the forest near Dunkirk for the waves to calm down,” Umed recalls. “In the end, we set off, sixty people on one pontoon, including women and children; hardly anyone could swim, I couldn’t. And only half of us had vests.”

In Kurdistan, I asked his brother how he remembered that day.

— At night, I received a message from him: “Hey, Bazo, the dinghy is leaking, we’re sinking, I want to say goodbye,” Rebaz recalls. — I began to come to terms with the thought that I had just lost my brother. I really didn’t want him to cross the sea, which is why we chose the route through Belarus. And still, he ended up at sea.

The sinking pontoon was spotted by a British Coastguard patrol. On the third of October, Umed came ashore at Dover. A year and a half later, he was granted refugee status in the UK and began efforts to bring his wife and son to him. He is learning English, but he still has no job. One of the first things he did in the UK was to organize a demonstration of solidarity with activists persecuted in Kurdistan.

Abdi Biratu – only bones remain

Deriba Biratu Fite, Abdie’s brother, in his room at a hostel run by the Wolno Nam Foundation. Kraków, June 2024.

“That day, we organized a large search, near Czerlonka, in the Białowieża commune,” says Agata Kluczewska of the Podlaskie Volunteer Humanitarian Emergency Service.

“Suddenly, someone shouted there was a body. We went over there. There were human remains, an exposed pelvis, leg bones. I remember that one leg was strangely curled. He was lying in a hollow, apparently he had wanted to shield himself from the wind. His head was turned to the south, as if catching the last rays of the sun. There were remnants of skin on his skull. His things were dragged off some ways, which indicated that animals got to him. We found a phone case and scattered photos next to the body. Those allowed Abdi to be initially identified.

Activists call the police, mark the spot with red ribbons.

“I sat with these remains for a while. I felt that I had to see this man off somehow. I held a private vigil of sorts. And then it seemed to me that I was getting to know his story a little. I felt this terrifying cold in my bones. I imagined him crawling into this hole, looking for shelter. And then dying of hypothermia.”

Returning to the parking lot, Kluczewska finds a phone. Thinking that someone from the search line has lost sit, she picks it up and puts it in her purse. Back at home, she remembers she has it. And then a thought crosses her mind: “What if it’s his phone?”.“It wouldn’t turn on, but I took out the memory card. There were photos on it. There he was, in a restaurant, at college, with friends. I later gave the phone to his brother.”

Abdi Biratu Fite from Ethiopia goes missing mid-December 2022; his body is not found until February of the following year. Someone next of kin is supposed to come to identify the body using the DNA method. The problem is that neither the parents nor the siblings have a passport. The invitation procedure, obtaining an ID, and a humanitarian visa (issued in special cases due to a humanitarian crisis, threat to life, health, or freedom) takes three months. Deriba Biratu Fite, Abdi’s older brother, does not arrive until the end of May. The costs of the flight and accommodation are covered by the Podlaskie Volunteer Humanitarian Emergency Service, and the burial is paid for by the commune. Abdi is buried on June 10, 2023, at the cemetery in Białowieża.

I watch the video of Abdi’s funeral. A handful of people gather around the grave – a few activists, a few Ethiopians living in Poland. Deriba staggers on his feet, walks to the grave, throws a few flowers to his brother, then kneels down and cries, gets up again, throws a handful of soil. The live broadcast in Ethiopia is watched by Abdi’s family [photographer Maciej Moskwa was at the funeral, “Pismo” No. 8/2023 – editor’s note].

“So how do you like it in Addis Ababa, my friend?” Yohannes, my fixer, asks one day, seeing me staring at the scenes passing outside the windows of our car.

I answer diplomatically that it is an interesting city. The truth is, however, that it overwhelms and stifles me. I had been wandering its streets for a day now, and yet I do not find anything interesting to it except for the name, in which I feel the unfulfilled promise of something fascinating. In Amharic, it means “new flower”. A humongous city, sprawled over the hills, half in ruins, half under construction. Because Addis undoubtedly has aspirations – after all, it is the headquarters of the African Union and holds over a hundred embassies. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali has consistently plied the city with new investments, mercilessly demolishing old districts in the process. But all these are just raisins in the dense dough of slums and abject poverty. A large part of the city still has no running water, electricity, or asphalt.

I walk through crowded streets, inhale the thick fumes from thousands of old, worn-out cars. I pass the street vendors right next to the Sheratons and Hiltons, I push between rusty Fiats and armoured Toyotas, I see pick-ups with machine guns passing by, crowds of young men with no work, and women clinging to the walls and curbs.

“Is it good living here?” I ask Yohannes.

“It’s okay.” His answer resonates with an even greater dose of diplomacy than mine.

This is the worst it has been in Ethiopia in a long time, I hear from almost everyone I talk to. In the north, the conflict between the central government and the Tigray Defense Forces (a paramilitary formation founded in 2020 to fight the Ethiopian army) is still smouldering. In the Amhara region (north-western and central Ethiopia), there is an insurgency of the nationalist Fano militia. The west and south are overwhelmed by the rise of the left-wing nationalist Oromo Liberation Army (OLA). In the south-east, the militias of the Ogaden Liberation Front (OLF) are still present. The separatist organizations are directly or indirectly supported by Eritrea, Egypt, and Somalia.

When Abyi Ahmed Ali took office as prime minister in 2018, he enjoyed unprecedented public and international support. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the conflict with Eritrea, and Western money flowed to Addis Ababa in a wide stream [for more on this topic, read Jon Lee Anderson, “Pismo” No. 3/2024 – editor’s note]. However, after the war crimes in Tigray came to light, with the complicity of troops from the neighbouring Eritrea at the behest of the prime minister, Abyi Ahmed Ali lost not only the sympathy of the Ethiopians, but also some of the Western financial aid.

In a country bedevilled by chaos, Addis Ababa is the only relatively safe place. At the end of 2020, more than 220 people are killed in an attack in the west of the country; the next attack, in June 2022, claims at least a hundred.

In October 2023, government troops massacre villages in the Amhara region, killing more than seventy people. In the recent months, Ethiopia has been overwhelmed by a wave of kidnappings, as ransom is the easiest way to finance further fighting. Both foreigners and locals are targeted. In August last year, a bus with sixty-three people was hijacked 170 kilometres from the capital, and in October in Oromia, employees of the Chinese company East Cement were abducted.

Worshippers in front of St. George’s Cathedral, Addis Ababa

I come to Ethiopia to find the people with whom Abdi Biratu Fite set off for Poland. Nekemtie, where Abdi comes from, is a town located more than 300 kilometres west of Addis, and one of the strongholds of the OLF. A place to get out of, to the capital if not farther.

Panorama of Addis Ababa from the hills surrounding the city.

Abdi, David, Samuel, Boju, and Nyaro; they have known each other since they were kids, grown up in the same neighbourhood, gone to the same school, pray and serve in the same Protestant church where Samuel’s father is the pastor. All of them come from large and quite poor families, they are in their twenties and they are convinced that there is no future for them in Ethiopia. Oromia is plunging into chaos, the clashes between the OLF and the government troops are intensifying, there are more and more kidnappings, and the army is on the streets of Nekemtie. Even a trip to Addis can be dangerous. But they are ambitious: Abdi and Samuel are studying computer science, Boju wants to become a lawyer, David wants to be a programmer, Nyaro dreams of studying marketing. In Ethiopia, even with such education, the chances for work are slim. “If you want to have a job, you must have connections,” I hear from Samuel. So, Europe it is.

“We had friends who had already managed to get to the Netherlands, it was inspiring,” says Nyaro. “When we made the final decision, we went to Addis to look for an intermediary. We wanted to go directly to Poland, to one of the universities, but they told us that it would take far longer and might not even work. They suggested a quicker and easier way: Belarus.”

Nyaro, kolega Abdiego na ulicach Addis Abeby, kwiecień 2024 roku.

I easily find “job placement and education” agencies on social media, and then in the city. I ask my fixer to go to a few and ask about a trip to Europe. There are two ways: a tourist visa to Russia or – a more popular option – a student visa to Belarus. The requirements are: a resume, documents from a local university, and proof of having about $3,000 for the first year of college. The agency contacts the embassy and the university, arranges the invitation and visa. The waiting time for formalities is usually three months, and the visa itself is obtained at the airport in Minsk. Up to this point, everything is fully legal.

“What if I don’t want to go to Belarus?” my fixer asks cautiously in one of the offices.
“We have contacts to the right people in Minsk who will organize your further journey,” says the woman behind the desk, smiling kindly. “However, we do not take responsibility for that. You will get the contact only after you have paid the deposit. Be ready to spend an additional two to four thousand dollars.”

The eastern route, like other migration routes leading to Europe, is controlled by organized groups of smugglers. These are in fact very rich organizations run by people from Turkey, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia. They operate on various routes, and the one leading through Poland is the latest offer in their range of smuggling services. If a person decides to do business with a smuggler, they deposit the money in a broker’s office. These are only paid out when the migrant reaches Germany. A person landing in Moscow is picked up by a driver (migrants call them “taxi drivers”), who takes them to a collaborating hotel or private apartment. Most often, the same driver transports the migrant to Minsk for an additional $300. Another provides transport from Minsk to the border. Here the person is picked up by a smuggler, if travelling on the more expensive package. In principle, the smuggler should know the terrain and provide the necessary tools – a ladder, shovels, saws, or a pontoon if one opts to cross the river. In the budget package, the migrant only gets a location on the Polish side of the border. There will be another driver waiting to take them to Germany. The cost is $600–$700. Drivers and smugglers operating on subsequent stages of the route are part of one network. In total, the trip costs up to $10,000.

First photo: October 2022, Minsk airport, standing proudly, smiling, with Belarusian flags in the background. Five friends get into the Belarusian State Academy of Rural Economy in the town of Gorky near the border with Russia in the Mogilev region. There are already many Libyans and Ugandans there, but there are also regular students from Belarus.

“We didn’t care where we were, we didn’t want to study there anyway,” says Nyaro. “Over two months, we learned a little Russian, and that’s it. Abdi took care of the farther journey. We didn’t have money for a smuggler, but we had some information from friends in the Netherlands. Anyway, it wasn’t complicated, all you had to do was find the right taxi, the drivers knew what to do.”
“Why didn’t you wait until spring?” I ask.

“We were excited, we were in a hurry to get to Europe,” says Samuel. “In November, a few Libyans from our university had gone across, they were already in Germany. We were running out of money, because the tuition fee only covered the dormitory, and we still had to eat. So it was now or never. We spent our last money on the ride to the border.”

A taxi driver drops off the group somewhere north of Brześć, much farther from the border than they had agreed. It is December 12, 2022, evening, terribly cold. Luck is not on their side – in the middle of the month, a wave of bitter frost comes over eastern Poland, temperatures drop to minus 15 degrees Celsius. They are wearing light jackets and ordinary sneakers. The frost makes the phone batteries drain quickly, there is no way to navigate, they feel their way along in the dark. And the terrain is difficult: dense forest, swamps, and on top of that, it is night, with a snowstorm and gusty wind. Abdi and David are in top shape, they are healthy, the rest fall a bit behind, Samuel complains of leg pain, Nyaro is sick. After several hours they reach the Belarusian sistema (a physical barrier consisting of a fence and razor wire entanglements, running several hundred meters along the border). A stroke of luck: they find a ladder by the wires, cross without any problems. What they don’t know is that the sistema has sensors.

“We thought we had gone quite far, so we set up camp. We were terribly tired, wet, and cold, I couldn’t feel my legs and arms anymore,” Samuel recalls. “I don’t know how long we slept. David was the first to wake up, shouting: It’s the army, it’s the army! I was in a kind of lethargy, I didn’t know where I was and whether what was happening was still a dream or reality. Before I could get up, there were soldiers next to me, and dogs were tugging at Boju, who was lying next to me. The soldiers were shouting, ordering us to speak Russian, there were more of them with every moment. They ordered us to kneel with our hands behind our heads, they started beating us. Then I realized that Abdi and David had escaped.

Samuel, Nyaro, and Boju are arrested and taken to the militsiya station. The next day, the Belarusians take them back to the forest and tell them to go to Poland. It is still freezing cold. Samuel loses consciousness. He wakes up in a hospital in Grodno, sees bandages on his legs and hands. He does not know what happened to the rest of his friends.

I read the hospital discharge. Diagnosis: general second-degree hypothermia (body temperature 30 degrees Celsius), frostbite on all limbs (II and III degree). Frostbite with tissue necrosis affecting several areas of the body, plus acute kidney injury. Serious condition, incoherent, periodically screaming in pain, jerking limbs.

“Do you want to see my hand?” Samuel asks. “I did not agree to the amputation. I can’t move it, I feel nothing in it, it’s dead and black.”

Samuel spends two weeks in the hospital. Boju and Nyaro are also hospitalized for a few days with extensive frostbite.

“After three days, David called me,” says Nyaro. “He begged us to send a taxi to the border to pick him up. We collected the money, managed to bring him to the dormitory. He was barely alive. At night he woke up screaming, we thought he was crazy. They took him to the hospital. Three days later, he died, and we were called in to identify the body.”

The second photo: a fresh grave covered with snow, a cross, a few red flowers. David Dinka 1999–2022.

David and Abdi managed to escape the manhunt. They went north, crossed the border probably in the vicinity of the settlements of Przewłoka or Podcerkwa, in the middle of the Białowieża Forest. There was still a freeze of minus 15 degrees and a snowstorm. Cold and exhausted, they spent another night in a hole in the ground. When David woke up in the morning, Abdi was already dead. David moved on and managed to reach the buildings of Czerlonka. There he was found lying on the pavement, semi-conscious, missing one shoe. The Border Guard took him straight to Belarus.

In border guard slang, the opening through which people are pushed into Belarus is called a „parcel locker” or „life window.” Pushback, meaning expulsion. Dumping

Is anyone but activists searching for missing migrants? In Poland, the police are authorised to search for missing persons.

“Does the police even accept reports of missing migrants?” I ask Katarzyna Czarnota from the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.

“Unfortunately, despite the universal law that should protect everyone, there is no consistent practice. Some police stations accept reports, others do not. We are most dismayed about the excuses, when the police respond that there is no evidence that a person crossed the border with Poland and was in its territory. The problem is that the border regulation allows Border Guard officers to carry out undocumented detention and escort to the border line. In fact, such actions can lead to enforced disappearance. Enforced disappearances are those in which representatives of the state play an active role. We have also heard arguments about “illegal migrants”. This is what systemic criminalization leads to,” Czarnota explains. Since September 2023, the HFHR, in cooperation with the Itaka Foundation, has been conducting a project financed by Oxfam, investigating the scale of disappearances on the Polish-Belarusian border.

Meanwhile, according to Polish legal regulations, crossing the border outside the official border point is not a crime, but a misdemeanour. Many people at the border are in a state of higher necessity, which means that they have no choice but to cross the border in an unregulated way.

“Why do we use pushbacks?” I asked this question to a Border Guard officer with twenty years of experience, who wanted to remain anonymous.

“Because we can. There is permission for it, no one will give us any trouble, besides, they do the same thing everywhere in Europe. Obviously, there are people from vulnerable groups among them: women, children, victims of human trafficking. But no one wants to set a precedent.

The system of application review for international protection is completely inefficient, and besides, a huge number of these people do not qualify for refugee status. The deportation system is just as inefficient. The readmission agreement with Belarus has been suspended, countries of origin do not accept them because they have no interest in it.”

“Can it be done differently?”

“Nobody gives a thought to that. A certain type of people go into the service. Aversion to foreigners is the norm, open racism also happens. And there’s a sense of frustration, because everyone wants to defend them, and we can’t say a word, because soon some activist or journalist will put it in print. This breeds rage against migrants. Nobody wants them here, and still they keep coming, so you fucking gotta catch them, keep them from submitting an application, and throw them out. Pushback is just readmission in practice.”

The Provincial Administrative Courts in Warsaw and Białystok have already issued a number of judgments confirming that the method used in most cases of returning foreigners to the border line with Belarus, without examining their individual situation and without initiating the procedures provided for by law, is inconsistent with the provisions of national, EU, and international law. According to the courts, the regulation of the Minister of the Interior and Administration on pushbacks of August 20, 2021 was issued in excess of statutory authorization.

According to the HFHR, Border Guard officers who carry out pushbacks may be held legally liable for, among other things, endangering life or health, causing serious bodily harm, failure to provide assistance, unlawful deprivation of liberty, abandonment of a minor or helpless person, or even abuse of a person deprived of liberty. Unlike irregular border crossing, these are serious crimes, and some of them are not subject to the statute of limitations. On April 15, 2024, the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Siedlce initiated an investigation into the abuse of powers and failure to comply with duties in the performance of activities related to the protection of the state border by officers of the Border Guard, police, and other services in the period from September 2021 to March 2024.
Are pushbacks and denials of the right to apply for asylum a Polish specialty? By no means.

They are also used by Lithuania and Latvia, and recently even Finland. Illegal practice was also the norm on the Balkan route, on the borders of Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Greece, and Italy. Furthermore, refugees are not only returned by the services of individual countries. Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (headquartered in downtown Warsaw), led in 2015-2022 by Frenchman Fabrice Leggeri known for his far-right views and aversion to the EU’s migration policy and aid organisations, was accused of using the practice on a large scale in the Aegean Sea.

An opening in the wall on the Poland-Belarus border allowing for pushbacks.

Greek services towed migrants back to Turkey, while their ships created waves that threatened boats with capsizing, and were in no hurry to provide assistance, Frontex deliberately stopping air patrols to avoid providing evidence of these activities. The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) found Leggeri co-responsible for Frontex’s cover-up of the forcible return of migrants from Greece to Turkey, as well as irregularities in the institution’s management and misguided human resources policy. Leggeri, who was dismissed in 2022, ran in the European Parliament elections from the list of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. Today he is an MEP. Although Leggeri’s successor, Hans Leijtens, announced the end of pushbacks, he soon had to face charges himself. On July 14, 2023, another boat sank off the coast of Greece. Although Frontex and the Greek Coast Guard were constantly tracking the position of the vessel, although their units were on-site, they did not provide assistance. Out of 750 passengers, only 104 people were rescued. At the request of the European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly, an investigation was launched into the matter.

In 2021, for the first time in history, Frontex was brought before the Court of Justice of the European Union by a Syrian family who had been deported from Greece to Turkey in 2016 without any formal decision and despite the fact that the asylum procedure was already underway. In September, the EU court of first instance dismissed the lawsuit, arguing that responsibility for respecting human rights rests solely with EU member states. Meanwhile, Frontex’s budget in 2023 amounted to €845 million. The agency is currently building a new headquarters in Warsaw for 140 million euros. By 2027, it is to ultimately employ 10 thousand people.

A report by the organization Protecting Rights at Borders from February 2024 reveals that there were 8,403 deportations at European borders from September 1 to December 31, 2023. One-third of these cases involved minors.

A February 2024 report by Protecting Rights at Borders reveals as many as 8,403 deportations at European borders between September 1 and December 31, 2023. One third of the cases involved minors.

But Frontex, although its headquarters is only 220 kilometres from the Polish-Belarusian border, has not been present there even once. Poland, unlike Lithuania and Latvia, has never asked for such help.
“Despite the fact that in the European Parliament there were voices criticizing the Polish government for inhumane treatment of migrants, as early as October 7 [2021] a resolution was adopted declaring solidarity with Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia,” notes doctor Jolanta Szymańska from the Polish Institute of International Affairs. “Ursula von der Leyen called the actions of Belarus ‘a hybrid attack, aimed at destabilizing Europe’. Although the EU refused to co-finance the wall on the border (the government applied for €218 million from the Integrated Border Management Fund), it did not object to its construction, nor did it question Polish policy on the border, including illegal pushbacks. In addition, the European Commission has adopted a proposal for temporary emergency measures for Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. These include, among others, the possibility to restrict the right to submit asylum applications by limiting reception locations, extending the deadline for registration of applications, the possibility of applying an accelerated border procedure to all applications, limiting material benefits for migrants, as well as the possibility to seek support from EU agencies on a priority basis.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) also expressed solidarity with Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, and a contingent of soldiers from Great Britain and Estonia arrived at the border. The European Commission has initiated talks with Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates, which resulted in the elimination of many air connections to Belarus. Ursula von der Leyen, Dunja Mijatović (former Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights), Ylva Johansson (EU Commissioner for Home Affairs) have repeatedly stressed that the way Belarus uses and treats migrants to destabilize the EU is unacceptable. However, they did not talk about the violation of migrants’ rights and Poland’s failure to respect international law.

“Between December 12 and 16, 2022, did the Border Guard have any contact with an Ethiopian citizen named David (Dawit) Dinka, aged 22–23? According to the testimonies of witnesses, David Dinka was most likely found in the village of Czerlonka or Czerlonka Leśna by one of the residents. Then he was taken away by the Border Guard. What happened to him?” I wrote to the Podlaski Border Guard Unit.

Answer: “There have been no incidents with Ethiopian citizens in these days in this area.”

After three months Boju, Samuel, and Nyaro returned to Ethiopia. To finance the entire trip, Samuel’s parents borrowed money from friends, about $13,000 in total, in the hope that Samuel would get a good job in Europe. They had to sell their house to pay off their debts. Abdi’s journey was financed by his entire family and friends.

After the funeral of his brother, Deriba Biratu refused to return to Ethiopia. He left his wife and two-year-old daughter there. A humanitarian visa does not guarantee the right of permanent residence in Poland, it is difficult to convert it into other forms of protection such as refugee status or subsidiary protection. Deriba applied for a short-term residence permit, which would give him the opportunity to legally stay in Poland for six months. The application was dismissed. Deriba lives in a centre near Krakow run by the Wolno Nam Foundation, where he has room and board. When we first met, he could hardly hold back his tears.
“In his last message, he wrote that they were at the border and that I should pray for him,” says Deriba. “After a few days I started calling my friends in Germany, I also found organizations in Poland. But no one knew anything. He was my youngest brother, only twenty-four years old.

Three months later, I received a phone call. They said they had found him. I still have before my eyes the images that were shown to me by the police: his skeleton, his hands, his legs. Only I know the details, I only told the family that he was dead.”

After nearly a year in Poland, in April 2024, Deriba filed for international protection. Because he lives outside of the centre for foreigners, he is entitled to an equivalent of PLN 750, as well as medical insurance and access to health care.

“Why didn’t you do it right away? Did you think you would return to Ethiopia?” I ask.

“I can’t. I’ll show you something, I haven’t told you about it before.”

Deriba pulls a plastic card out of his pocket, and I recognize the flag on the back. It is an Oromo Liberation Army membership card.

“Going back to Ethiopia is a mortal danger for me,” says Deriba. “I thought when I settled matters related to the funeral, I would go to Germany, because it was difficult to get asylum here. But now you have a new government, and I have grown to like Poland. I want to put up a proper tombstone for my brother and pay off my family’s debts.”

Deriba Biratu Fite came to Poland for his brother’s funeral.

While in Ethiopia, I also spoke on the phone with Abdi and Deriba’s father. A journey to Nekemtie turned out to be impossible for security reasons.

“Apparently that was God’s plan,” Biratu says. “You have to see His hand in everything. The fact that we could watch the funeral was very important to us, it was a relief from our pain. There were so many people there, journalists, activists. Please thank the people who made this possible. My dream is to see my son’s grave one day. I’m glad that Deriba stayed there, and I want him to have a better life. Now he is our hope.”

The grave of Abdie Biratu Fite at the cemetery in Białowieża, May 2024.

What is the scale of migration across the Polish-Belarusian border? At the beginning of February 2024, I sent a spokesperson for the Border Guard several questions: how many people have informally crossed the Polish-Belarusian border, how many people have been detained after crossing the border, how many “foiled attempts” have there been, how many migrants have been pushed back to the Belarusian side? I asked for data broken down by the last three years. The spokesperson referred me to the statistical data published on the Border Guard website. Unfortunately, the data that I am looking for is not there, I do not find information about pushbacks nor attempts to cross the border. In August 2023 and January 2024, Gazeta Wyborcza and OKO.press tried to analyse the Border Guard data. Unsuccessfully. I call Natalia Ciastoń, a data analyst from We Are Monitoring, an association which collects data for Grupa Granica.

“Why can’t we get our hands on such basic data as how many people have crossed and how many people have been kicked out?” I ask.

“The Border Guard’s data are presented in a chaotic and inconsistent way, making it impossible to conduct a reliable analysis,” explains Ciastoń. “They don’t have a coherent methodology, people are mixed up with cases. For example: one person could have tried to cross the border many times.”
“Crossing the state border against the regulations (CSBAR)”, “attempts at CSBAR”, “prevention” (is this also deportation?), “disclosure”, “detention”, “events related to illegal migration” – these are terms used by the Border Guard interchangeably in various sources.

“Did you ask what these terms mean?”

“The answers are also inconsistent,” says Ciastoń, wringing her hands. “We have even been told that the Border Guard Headquarters did not collect the data covered by our inquiry. Sometimes we received different answers from the headquarters and from the branches. From the news page of the Podlaskie Border Guard Unit, published on the website of the Border Guard Headquarters, we get a completely different picture than from the statistical sheets published by the Headquarters. Even I find it difficult to understand this methodology.”

The most difficult thing is to estimate the number of pushbacks. This is because the deportations are carried out on the basis of two separate legal acts. The first is the Regulation of the Minister of Internal Affairs of 13 March 2020 on the temporary suspension or restriction of border traffic at certain border crossings (as amended on 20 August 2021), the second is the Decision on Leaving the Territory of the Republic of Poland issued based on the Act on Foreigners.

“The people deported based on the Decision leave a paper trail and are included in the statistics of the Border Guard. Those deported under the Regulation, and these are the vast majority as of July 2023, leave no trace. According to our estimates, there were about 16.5 thousand deportations in 2023. From the response of the Podlaskie Border Guard Branch to inquiries about the number of deportations after the new government took power, we know that from December 13, 2023 to June 4, 2024, there were 7,317. But we can only be sure about our own data, because they are based on documented reports. They are reliable, but incomplete by definition. From the beginning of the crisis until the end of June 2024, We Are Monitoring collected 18,859 reports from migrants. 8,805 cases of pushbacks were documented, of which 407 involved children. However, it is impossible to precisely estimate what percentage of the total that is,” Ciastoń enumerates.

A picture of the situation also emerges from the information given in February 2024 by Professor Maciej Duszczyk, Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of the Interior and Administration. He confirmed that until July 5, 2023, the Border Guard did not keep any records of people subjected to pushbacks. From that moment until January 16, 2024, 6,070 people were returned.

I next turned to the Bundespolizei. After all, even the Border Guard refers to German data in its reports. In 2022, the German federal police registered a total of 8,511 unauthorized entries of people who arrived via Belarus at the German-Polish border. In the following year, those numbered at 11,881. Of course, this is approximate data, as it should be remembered that migrants who crossed from Belarus to Lithuania or Latvia and migrants from Slovakia also travel through Poland to Germany.

A single conclusion comes to mind: despite 1.6 billion zlotys spent on the wall and the electronic barrier, the Polish border is still not a major obstacle. Maybe because it simply is poorly designed. The wall stands almost on the border line – “almost” being the important word here. Although we have heard many times that any interventions past the wall are impossible, Border Guard officers can enter the other side without crossing the Belarusian border, and they sometimes do so. Nevertheless, access to the foreground of the barrier is so limited that there is no possibility of securing the approach to the wall from the Belarusian side with concertina coils or cameras, nor is it possible to fly a drone past the wall. That is why it is so easy to approach it, cut it, put up a ladder, or dig a tunnel (the foundations of the wall are only 1.5 meters deep). The five-and-a-half-metre-long vertical beams have no transverse elements, so they are easy to bend, for example with a car jack. Seismic sensors in an area with a lot of animals similar in size to humans are also of limited effectiveness

The wall does not prevent crossings, but causes numerous injuries. In March 2024, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) published the report Death, Suffering, Destitution: The Human Costs of EU’s Migration Policies, part of which is devoted to the Polish-Belarusian border. In it, I read that nearly 40 percent of MSF patients had injuries caused by the perimeter wall infrastructure, such as blunt injuries, sprains, deep cuts, and fractures. More than 60 percent of patients have experienced physical or sexual violence.

Pain, extreme exhaustion, frostbite, and hypothermia are the most common cases MSF doctors have encountered. Patients said that Polish border and security services beat, intimidated, and humiliated people, attacked them with dogs and pepper spray, confiscated and destroyed their belongings, and then forced them to return to Belarus. They reported that they had asked and even begged for permission to remain in the European Union.

Fortress Europe

A wall over 180 kilometers long running along the land border with Belarus.

However, the eastern migration route leading through our border is still only a periphery of the great migration to Europe. According to Frontex data, in 2023, 5,608 irregular border crossings were registered there, fewer than in 2022 and over 2.5 thousand fewer than in 2021. Meanwhile, 380,227 cases were reported on all routes leading to Europe – almost twice as many as in 2021. The most frequented routes remain the Central Mediterranean (157,479 cases), the Eastern Mediterranean (60,073 cases), and the Balkans (99,068 cases). As many as 28 percent of all migrants are Syrians.

After eight years of negotiations, the European Parliament passed the Migration and Asylum Pact by a narrow majority on 10 April 2024. In May, the EU Council voted on it. It is a set of ten legal acts introducing, among other things, a uniform asylum procedure, new rules for obtaining international protection, and a solidarity mechanism. The pact is expected to enter into force in 2026.

“What does this mean for the average migrant?” I ask Jolanta Szymańska of the Polish Institute of International Affairs.

“If they read these one thousand three hundred pages, the information they’d glean would be that it is not profitable to enter the Union by illegal means. Because if they are caught, they will be automatically put through an accelerated identification procedure, with the assumption of being sent back, even if they come from a war-torn country.”

The Common European Asylum System unifies the procedures for granting and withdrawing international protection, provides for the creation of border centres for asylum seekers, and introduces the principle of regular verification of refugee status. The accelerated border procedure is to be applied both to people who submit an application at a border crossing point and to those who are apprehended trying to enter the EU. These people are to be transported to centres in transit zones (in theory outside the EU, so there will be no need to apply European law).

The procedure is to be automatically implemented for people who threaten security, people who mislead the authorities by providing false information, but also for citizens of countries with recognition of asylum applications not exceeding 20 percent. These are de facto most of the migrants’ countries of origin. This is contrary to the Geneva Convention, according to which each asylum application must be considered individually in order to assess whether a given person is in danger. The pact also expands the system for collecting personal and biometric data of migrants, such as facial scans (including those of children), which is controversial in the light of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“All this aims to make further attempts to cross the border more difficult. The second message is that the person will not necessarily go to their country of choice, because they may be relocated,” explains Szymańska. “So if you want to come to the EU, you can only do it legally, by submitting an asylum application at the border crossing.”

Concertina coils secure the approach to the wall.

The controversial relocation mechanism posits that member states will be obliged to accept migrants or provide technical and financial support (20,000 euros per person not accepted). Unlike the 2016 proposal, this is to be a permanent mechanism, not just a corrective one. Every year, at least 30,000 migrants are to be relocated to other countries from countries experiencing increased migratory pressure (mainly Italy and Greece). Is that a lot? In 2023, Poland issued 320,630 work permits for foreigners, and two years earlier – 504,172 permits (these numbers do not include Ukrainians and Belarusians) [Szymon Opryszek mentioned them in his report, “Pismo” No. 5/2024 – editor’s note]. The pact also expedites the mechanism of deportation to the first EU country based on the Dublin system. More people may come to Poland on this basis than as a result of possible relocations.

“Has the specificity of our border been somehow recognised in the pact?”

“Migrants have been also used instrumentally by Turkey or Morocco, but usually in order to obtain specific concessions from the European Union or a neighbouring country,” comments Szymańska. “For Lukashenko, the goal is clearly the long-term destabilization of our country. This is the only case where a state actor openly participates in human smuggling. However, I do not see any reason why the border procedures of the pact could not be used in Poland.”

“Is the pact a good answer to the growing migration pressure at all?”

“I doubt it,” Szymańska winces. “The pact is trying to reconcile two extreme assumptions. On the one hand, we are sending people away en masse, which Western and Eastern Europe demanded, and on the other hand, we are sharing responsibility, which was what the countries of Southern Europe wanted. Nobody likes it. After the elections and the forming of the new Commission, a plan for the implementation of the pact is to be created, and a lot will depend on it. Migration policy, in order to be effective, requires the consent of everyone. As long as that is absent, it is highly probable that the pact will remain on paper only, and the Union will have a huge image problem. The mere fact that we put in writing that we would send people on does not mean anything. After all, someone has to take them.”

But this problem is solved with money. In 2016, the EU signed a migration agreement with Turkey. Recently, it has concluded agreements with Tunisia and Egypt, and plans to do the same with Morocco and Mauritania, and a lot of money has also flowed to Libya. The EU pays countries ruled by brutal dictatorships to solve the problem for us. In 2021, Greece recognized Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey as a safe third country in order to send migrants there with a clear conscience. At the end of 2023, Italy negotiated a bilateral agreement with Albania, stipulating that people who are intercepted by the coast guard at sea (i.e. outside the EU) will be sent back there. In Albanian refugee camps, they are to wait for their asylum applications to be processed. The European Commission supported the agreement.

The United Kingdom is also applying such externalization of borders, thereby outsourcing the problem; in 2022, it negotiated an agreement with Rwanda, according to which people who entered the United Kingdom irregularly will be sent to that country. Although the original bill was blocked by the Supreme Court as incompatible with human rights, in April 2024 the British Parliament voted for a revised bill. Fifteen member states are demanding a mechanism modelled on the British one to be implemented in European migration policy. Poland included. Prime minister Donald Tusk has consistently criticized the pact for the migrant relocation mechanism, vowing not to allow it to include Poland, which has accepted a huge number of refugees from Ukraine and Belarus.

“In 2026, invoking the Ukrainian migrants may already be water under the bridge,” emphasizes Szymańska. “Yes, for a moment we did have 4 million refugees from Ukraine, but they have long since either returned or went to other countries. Those who stayed will have entered the labour market by 2026 and become independent, they will no longer burden the system. Besides, Ukrainians are the best example that refugees can be effectively integrated and included in the economy. And the truth is that an ageing Europe needs migrants, and a lot of them. But in the pre-election debate, anti-immigration rhetoric has and will always score points.”

Tusk argues that the priority should be “effective control at the border and protection of a country’s territory”. He is probably learning from past missteps. In 2015, the assent given by the Civic Platform (PO) and the Polish People’s Party (PSL) government to the controversial EU system of migrant quotas (obligatory take-in of migrants from countries under migratory pressure by other EU countries) was one of the reasons for the Law and Justice (PiS) takeover of power.

“Does the pact say anything about human rights and procedures such as pushbacks?”
“It does, like any administrative document. But I wouldn’t say that this is its essence,” Szymańska sums up.

Wall on the land border between Poland and Belarus. Photo by Magdalena Kicińska.

More than 160 Polish and international NGOs spoke out against the pact, including Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Grupa Granica, and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.

The price that migrants pay to smugglers is rising regularly. According to Europol estimates, in 2022 alone, smuggling people to Europe generated €407 million in revenue. These estimates refer only to migration routes leading through the Mediterranean.

Grace and Tatcher – concertina is a ruthless thing

Tatcher and his son Godzin, known as Dudusiem, Kraków, June 2024.

In the migrant centre near Krakow, apart from Deriba from Ethiopia, I also meet with two young women from Cameroon – Grace and Tatcher. According to data obtained from Grupa Granica, Cameroonians, along with Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Congolese, are the largest group of migrants from Africa on the eastern route.

The conflict in Cameroon, which has been ongoing in its current form since 2016, is a typical relic of the colonial era. Until 1919, most of today’s Cameroon was a German colony, sandwiched between the British colonies in the west and the French colonies in the east and south. After World War I, African possessions of the German Empire were taken over by the Entente. Cameroon fell almost entirely to France. Almost, since the British appropriated the areas adjacent to the British colony and protectorate of Nigeria, where the mandated territory of British Cameroon was created. In 1960, French Cameroon gained independence. A year later, a referendum was held in British Cameroon on integration with one of its neighbours. As a result, the northern part of British territory was annexed by Nigeria, and the southern part was incorporated into the Republic of Cameroon as an autonomous region, despite the fact that most of its inhabitants were English-speaking. On top of the linguistic divisions, the situation was exacerbated by ethnic feuds between the dominant and privileged Bamileke population and minorities in the west of the country.

As soon as 1970s, the autonomy was abolished, and English language was also systematically removed from administration and education. In response to this, in the mid-1980s. Fongum Gorji Dinka, a lawyer and political activist, began calling for secession and the creation of a self-proclaimed Republic of Ambazonia (named after Ambas Bay). Since the 1990s, there has been a regular conflict between the central government and the National Council of South Cameroon, which has twice declared Ambazonia independent, in 1999 and 2006. At the end of 2016, English-speaking teachers and law enforcement staff went on strike, which unexpectedly gave rise to a civil war. In Bamenda, Buéa, and Limbé, murders, public executions, kidnappings, and assassinations began. Schools, public buildings, and villages were burning.

“And I was unlucky,” says twenty-year-old Grace. “I’m from Buéa in the southwest. Not only was I a francophone among the English-speaking population, but I am also of the Bamileke people.”

“At first, everyone thought the war would be short,” Tatcher adds. “But it got worse and worse. Terror became a daily thing. I lived in Bamenda, working in the hospital morgue, I prepared corpses for burial. I washed them, dressed them, sometimes did makeup. My partner was a soldier in the government army. He was in the war, and I was in the morgue, where the victims of this war came every day. Sometimes a neighbour, acquaintance, or friend was lying on the table.”

For Grace, her first personal experience of war was the death of her brother in 2017. Murders of French-speaking civilians were a daily occurrence in the cities of Ambazonia. One Sunday, Grace’s brother went to his field to get some vegetables. A few hours later, a neighbour found him lying in the middle of the street. The family never found out who had killed him.

A year later, Grace lives in a house with her mother, second brother, and his small children. Two guerrillas on a motorbike are hanging around outside. Watching. It’s the holidays, Grace is at home with a friend, they are playing, cooking, watching TV. When they go out into the street, men on motorcycles start shouting in English “get out of here”.

“We pretended that we did not understand them. Finally, they stopped the motorbike, took out their machetes and walked towards us. I was terrified and convinced that I would not see my mother again. I knew that they were even killing women and children.”

Threats, insults, the blade of a machete flashes in front of her face. Then Grace and her friend are grabbed, pulled on a motorbike, and taken to a rebel camp. That’s where the beating begins. “How dare you speak French in the street?!” First blood flows: the torturers slash Grace’s feet with a machete. Then they grab her head and cut the hair, shave it with a machete down to the skin. The next morning, the crying, terrified, and bloodied girl is taken home and returned to her mother. An ultimatum is given: “You have twenty-four hours; tomorrow at six in the morning we will burn down your house. With you inside.” Grace is fourteen.

That same day, the whole family flees to Douala. Seventy kilometres makes a big difference, and besides, Douala is a huge city. Despite this, Grace experiences constant anxiety, stops talking, becomes alienated and aggressive, her health deteriorates. A friend of her mother’s suggests that Grace should flee abroad, because only there will she have a chance for psychological help and recovery. He says he has a cousin in Moscow. He assures them that he has contacts in the French embassy, that Grace will get a visa without any problems, and the way to France is simple. Grace’s mother gives him 3 million African francs (about $4,900), her entire savings.

According to Human Rights Watch, both sides of the conflict, known as the Anglophonic Crisis, regularly committed war crimes. By January 2023, at least 6,000 people had died in Cameroon’s southwestern provinces, about 600,000 had to flee their homes, and 2 million were in need of humanitarian aid. One of the victims was Tatcher’s partner.

Grace and her daughter Victoria on one of the bridges in Kraków.

“It started with a denunciation, someone told the partisans that my husband works in military intelligence. He was kidnapped while riding a bus just after Christmas in 2021, they demanded a ransom. I got threatening phone calls: ‘We know who you are, we know where you live, we know you have a daughter.’ First, I escaped from the city to the military barracks. That’s where I got the video. I saw him tortured and then thrown off a rock. An army patrol found him, he was alive, but paralyzed and cut with machetes. It was the last time I saw him, in the hospital. He told me to run away, because there were partisan collaborators among the military. He asked me to flee abroad. Two weeks later he died because he fell ill with malaria in the hospital. And I knew some of these people well,” Tatcher adds after a while. “After all, many of them were our neighbours.”

Tatcher escapes from the barracks in a hospital ambulance, since those do not get stopped. With two small children, she goes to Bafoussam and then on to Douala, where her in-laws live. However, they blame her for their son’s death. Tatcher has no other family – her mother died when she was three years old, her father left her, she was brought up in an orphanage. Tatcher escapes even further, to Yokadouma, a small town in the middle of the rainforest, about 60 kilometres from the border with the Central African Republic, over 800 kilometres to the east. Even there, she still gets text messages: “We’re looking for you, you won’t hide.”

“At first, I planned to escape through Libya. But at that time, it was said that there was a much easier way to Germany through Belarus,” says Tatcher. “I didn’t even know that Poland was in the way. It was all very simple, I got my Belarusian visa at the airport in Minsk.”

Tatcher sets off on her journey alone. Two months earlier, her son dies of a lung infection, and obtaining a passport for her daughter turns out to be impossible because the family refuses to give permission. She leaves her in the care of a friend in Yokadouma, promising that they will be together soon. Tatcher lands in Minsk on June 13, 2022. Only there, she begins to suspect that she is pregnant.

Meanwhile, Grace has been in Moscow for a year and a half.
“The friend’s cousin picked me up at the airport, we went to a KFC,” Grace recalls. “I called my mother, happy that everything was going so well. I gave him my passport, documents, and money, he was supposed to arrange everything. Then he took me home.”

However, when the door slams shut behind Grace, the “cousin” says that she is not going anywhere, from now on she will take care of his house and children. He threatens that if the girl says something to her mother, he will send his men to kill her.

“My mother called sometimes. I tried to pretend I’m happy, not to cry, I acted like everything was fine. Or I didn’t answer the phone. I was a slave. He didn’t pay me, I only had a place to sleep and something to eat. What’s more, he persuaded my mother that she had to send money to him, because the procedure was constantly generating new costs. Sometimes he and his wife would beat me when they weren’t happy with my work.”

A year and a half passes in this manner. But one day in May, Grace cannot stand it anymore. Once her keepers are away, she leaves the children, leaves the house, and runs off. No documents, no passport, no money. On the street, she accidentally falls into the arms of a black woman from the Congo, who invites her to her place. Over dinner, she tells Grace about her planned journey to Europe. She knows the route well, because she has already tried twice. A month later, in June, the two women get out of a taxi near Brześć, 13 kilometres from the Polish border.
It goes easy. The Congolese woman actually knows the terrain, she knows how to get through the Belarusian sistema and Polish barbed wire. The next day, a group of about thirty people emerges near the village of Anusin. It is Sunday. From the forest, Grace sees people going to church. This is where luck runs out. Instead of the expected smugglers, the Border Guard arrives to pick up the group. Some people make a run for it, but Grace faints and falls to the ground.

“I woke up when they poured water on me. They put me on a truck and took me somewhere else. Then I saw the Polish wall. They opened the passage and told us to go. It was already night. Belarusians were waiting for us.”

Second attempt, another place, Grace does not know where. She only remembers that they walked through swamps, sometimes waist-deep in water. And that it was always raining, and it was dawn when they reached the Polish barbed wire. In the downpour and mud, Grace stumbles and falls into the barbed wire. Concertina is a ruthless thing, Grace falls like a fly into a spider’s web. When she finally manages to get out, she is covered in blood. But Polish soldiers are already waiting on the road in front of the razor wire.

“They deported everyone except me and a Syrian family with their three children. I don’t know, maybe because there was a woman among the soldiers.”

Tatcher lives in a center run by the Wolno Nam Foundation.

Grace is taken to the hospital in Hajnówka. It’s July 2022. After her wounds are dressed, she is taken to the Border Guard station. She is convinced that she will be deported to Belarus. But instead of a truck, there is a desk and chairs in a garage-like room. When the guard conducting the interview asks if Grace wants to apply for asylum in Poland, she replies that she does, surprised that she can do it at all.

Around the same time, Tatcher is wandering somewhere in the border forests. Her first attempt to cross the border ends with a pushback. Her situation looks bleak: while passing through the concertina, she lost her bag with documents and passport. Worse, now there is no doubt that she is pregnant. Later, she will find out that she was six months along.

However, her prominent belly makes not impression on the Polish guards. And so they take her to Belarus, and on top of that, they destroy her phone. During the second attempt, Tatcher is lucky: she manages to evade the manhunt of the Polish services – they catch everyone except her. Heavily pregnant, she walks through forests and swamps for five days. She has no food with her, only some candy in her pocket and a piece of cheese. No water either – she drinks rainwater. She cannot call for help or check the map – the second phone, which the guards did not find, is out of charge. In her mind, she begs to meet anyone, even a guard patrol. Exhausted, she reaches a habitat in the middle of the forest, knocks on the door of a house, but no one answers. Farther in the forest, she passes abandoned camps of other migrants. On the fifth day, she notices a Border Guard car on the road.
Grace and Tatcher, two young girls from southwestern Cameroon, meet in a hospital in Białystok. Later, in the Guarded Centre for Foreigners in Białystok, they are put in the same room. They help each other as they can. Tatcher has some money, she also has contacts in Warsaw and Krakow. Most importantly, however, she has a phone which Grace can use to call her mother. After a few weeks in Poland, Grace finds out that she is pregnant.
“I was afraid. Fortunately, Tatcher was with me. She became my family, which I didn’t have here.”

In October 2022, Tatcher’s son Godwin was born. He will never know his father, who was murdered by the Ambazonian separatists. Five months later, Grace’s daughter was born. The girl named her Victoria. When I ask who the father is, she doesn’t answer, instead lowering her eyes. However, I know that Grace was already on her way to the Polish border at the time.

Tatcher and Grace submitted their applications for international protection on the same day at the Border Guard post in Białowieża. Despite their similarly dramatic stories from the country of origin, the Office for Foreigners decisions are different. After fifteen months waiting, Grace Djomo is granted refugee status by the Republic of Poland, a dream-come-true for every migrant. In the case of Tatcher Nguedia Nakeu, the Authority found that she had not demonstrated justified fear of persecution in her country of origin on the grounds of race, nationality, ethnicity, or political opinion, and that her possible return to Cameroon would not expose her to persecution.

Tatcher was not granted refugee status. However, she was granted subsidiary protection because her return could put her at risk of suffering serious harm through execution, torture, or degrading treatment. Similarly, refugee status and subsidiary protection were granted to the children: Godwin and Victoria. In practice, there is little difference between these forms of protection. In both cases, the person obtains an indefinite right of residence and access to the labour market and social benefits. The refugee also receives a Geneva travel document (valid for two years) and their residence card is valid for three years, not two as in the case of subsidiary protection.

Grace and Tatcher are just the exceptions to an overwhelming trend. In 2021, 7,700 applications for protection were submitted in Poland, a year later, 9,900, and in 2023, 9,500. The overwhelming majority are applications from citizens of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, two-thirds of whom are men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Poland is very willing to grant international protection to Belarusians and Ukrainians. Afghan citizens also have a good chance (in 2021, 58 percent of positive decisions, 41.5 percent of dismissals – which means that they left Poland before the procedure concluded). In the case of other nationalities, positive decisions are obtained extremely rarely.

Grace and Tatcher live in a centre run by the Wolno Nam Foundation. They have a shared room and free board. Grace is under the care of a psychologist. However, neither one nor the other can find a job. The only money they live on is a child grant of 800 PLN. Both are learning Polish and want to go to university. Tatcher dreams of bringing her daughter to Poland. Grace – that her mother could come join her.

“Was it worth it?” I ask Grace as I watch her feed little Victoria.

“I can still hear the sounds of war, the sounds of the police from the closed camp, the sounds of the bush. Sometimes, when a motorbike passes by on the street, images of the kidnapping come back to me; Tatcher laughs at me.

You can’t imagine the comfort of living in a place where you can sleep peacefully and raise your child without the fear that someone will harm them simply because of who they are.

Tatcher did not receive refugee status. However, she was granted subsidiary protection.

I have been in contact with the protagonists of this reportage and their families for over half a year. When we meet in mid-June, Deriba Biratu is just moving to Krakow. He is renting a room in the city centre and we help him move his belongings in. He smiles, full of hope that he will soon receive refugee status, which would allow him to legally take up work and bring his wife and daughter. Tatcher has already found a job, the money is enough for her to rent a small apartment and send her son to a nursery. She has also started the effort to bring her four-year-old daughter from Cameroon. Grace wants to live in Warsaw, she says that she prefers the glass skyscrapers to Krakow’s tenement houses, she is learning Polish. Umed Ahmed still lives in Wolverhampton, jobless, and is studying English intensely.

The people appearing in the report are not the only ones I talked to. I also met with Said from Egypt, a lawyer and law firm owner. He had to flee after receiving threats from the Muslim Brotherhood for being too close to the Christian minority. I spoke to Hadmi, a Hazara from Afghanistan who made the decision to leave when his friends were killed in an attack at the school he attended.

In Saudi Arabia, I saw Khaled, a journalist and social activist from Aden, Yemen. When he almost died in the forest after his eighth pushback, he decided to return to Yemen. There he wrote the book On the Walls of Poland, which was published in Cairo. He has sent the text to several Polish publishing houses, but none of them were interested. I also met Barzani from Syria, who has been living in Austria for a long time and was now trying to bring his parents to Europe. There was also Nazar from Iraq, who was stuck in Dunkirk, and Razhen, who was in the Bruzgi camp in Belarus with his family, and then managed to get to the UK. And Malvin from Sierra Leone, who dreamed of becoming a professional footballer. He waded through the swamps at the border holding football cleats up in his raised hand. He succeeded – he plays in one of the European clubs.

Is there something that unites all these people, one common denominator? Regardless of economic status, country of origin, gender, age, religion, it is one thing – forced migration.

“Will you try again?” “Of course, as soon as I have the money,” say those who did not succeed. “Do you want to go?” “That’s all I think about,” say the Kurds, the Yemenis, the Ethiopians who haven’t tried yet.

“For the current team at the Ministry of Interior and Administration, the principle of zero death at the border is crucial. The Border Guard is already setting up search and rescue groups. They are building a whole system to respond to signals about people who need help. At the same time, they announce their willingness to cooperate with local non-governmental organizations. This is a very big change. Truly, the security of our border does not preclude humanity and humanitarianism,” Undersecretary of State Maciej Duszczyk said in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza in February 2024.

A month later, in an interview with the same newspaper, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said: “No one is able to check every person Russia and Belarus send by the thousands to the border. They do it deliberately and in cold calculation. If we can handle a thousand, they will send ten thousand, and so on. Their goal is destabilization. They treat people as a tool, with absolute disregard. They want to bring us to the point where we abandon our own laws and values. This is the principal problem in our part of Europe. We must act as humanely as possible. Pushbacks as a method are morally unacceptable. We need to find a better solution, but the alternative cannot be helplessness.”

On 4 March, the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights laid out seven steps to restore the rule of law on the Polish-Belarusian border. These include, among others, recognition of the jurisdiction of the Polish state in the strip of land lying between the actual border line and the border barrier, respect for the right of migrants to apply for international protection in Poland, repeal of the illegal border regulations.
The Association for Legal Intervention also presented its recommendations. These include the restoration of the maximum period of stay in a guarded centre in the return procedure to twelve months, the repeal of the possibility of accommodating foreigners in guarded centres in rooms or residential cells with a standard of 2 square metres per person, and a ban on the detention of children. And allowing the reunification of families – this change would let Tatcher bring her daughter to Poland.

However, as early as May 2024, the state authorities changed their message. The Prime Minister, visiting the Border Guard units, said that “we have started intensive work on modern fortifications” and “there are no limits to the means when it comes to Poland’s security”. In his speech, Donald Tusk spoke about hybrid war, the pre-war era, and the security crisis, but he did not say a word about people on the border or migration. Cezary Tomczyk, Deputy Minister of National Defence, assured on TVN24 that Poland complies with international and national law and does not use pushbacks.
On May 14, Tusk said: “These are not refugees, there are fewer and fewer migrants, poor families looking for help. In eighty cases out of a hundred, we are dealing with organized groups of young men, eighteen to thirty years old, very aggressive. (…) I talked to the Prosecutor General today, we will need full protection, full legal security of our soldiers and officers.”

A few days before the elections to the European Parliament, the government announced the Shield East project. It is a long-term infrastructure plan for the eastern border, which includes anti-tank ditches, fortifications, concrete barriers, shelters, and minefields. The project is to be completed by 2028 at a cost of PLN 10 billion. On June 13, a 200-meter (and in some places up to 2 kilometres) wide buffer zone was introduced on a section of 60 kilometres of the border with Belarus, where entry is forbidden, also to journalists and aid organizations. The government is developing changes in the rules for the use of firearms.

From mid-December 2023, when Donald Tusk’s cabinet took power, ten more deaths at the border were documented by the end of June 2024. On May 28, a Polish soldier was attacked with a knife at the wall. He died in hospital a few days later.

“Does security have to stand in opposition to human rights? Could the migration crisis on the Polish border have been solved differently?” I asked this question to Professor Maciej Duszczyk in mid-October 2023, before he became Undersecretary of State.

“Yes, take them in and deport them,” the professor replied. “Then we would show that the trail is closed. Meanwhile, we reacted exactly as Lukashenko wanted. The forcible blockade at Usnarz was counterproductive and drew the interest of the public for a long time, and people came through anyway. The problem should have been solved within a few days, then the borders closed to prevent what happened in Kuźnica [the escalation of pressure from a large group of migrants reinforced by the actions of Belarusian services at the border crossing in Kuźnica Białostocka, after which the crossing was closed – editor’s note]. Now there is no simple solution. Today, anyone responsible for the border will have to maintain the current policy for at least another six months. Otherwise, the trail will be blown wide open and not only Lukashenko, but also PiS will be allowed to play their games.”

“What should our migration policy look like in the near future?”

“The first issue is the Europeanization of the crisis, that is, cooperation with Frontex, Europol, and the European Union Agency for Asylum. We should create two cooperating hubs – the Baltic and the Polish. We should build a group of common interest with Italy, Spain, Malta, Greece, Lithuania, and Latvia. We should completely cut Hungary out of this discussion. We should construct a plan using the EU’s visa, trade, and foreign policy, where migration must be a priority. In short: we do commerce with those who cooperate. Development funds, being tens of billions of euros, should be redirected from humanitarian aid to investment aid and should be dependent on cooperation with the EU on migration policy, including deportations. Poland spends 0.7 percent of its gross domestic product on development aid, which is quite a lot of money. We also need to reach an agreement with African and Asian transit countries, let the regimes there maintain their power in exchange for cooperation. I know, it’s an absolutely brutal solution, but we have no other choice. We need to regain control of the process. The EU should set up reception centres, for example in Tunisia and Morocco, for people who want to legally enter the EU.”
“And what about Belarus?”
“We must be ready for a coup in that country in the coming years and, as a consequence, thousands of refugees.”

In the spring of 2024, when Donald Tusk’s government managed to consolidate its power, I sent an extensive set of questions to Professor Duszczyk. The interview is published in full online. The Deputy Minister repeats that “the Europeanization of the migration challenge faced by Poland is an absolute priority” and the strategy of the Polish migration policy is currently being developed; it is to be ready by the end of this year.

I asked similar questions to Professor Witold Klaus from the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

“Polish, EU, and international laws should have simply been obeyed,” explains Klaus. “It is worth noting that for a time, they were. Although the events in Usnarz are a symbolic beginning of the crisis, traffic across the border began in April 2021. During those first months, the law was followed, until the centres ran out of room. Until then, it was possible to accept people, consider applications, grant protection or deport. This is the only safe way to control migration flows. Only within such a system do we know exactly how many people have crossed the border, who they are and where they came from, and the potentially dangerous people, probably a small number, can be placed in detention centres.”

Just before submitting the text to the editorial office, I go to Podlasie.

First, I find a grave in the parish cemetery in Białowieża. Abdi Biratu Fite, of whom only bones remain, lies a bit off the beaten track, under tall trees. I take a picture, send it to his brother Deriba.
Then I drive to the wall. The first concertina coils separating the border road and the approach to the barrier look like an insurmountable obstacle. And for anyone coming from the Belarusian side this is, after all, the final obstacle, with Europe beyond it. From poles several meters high, cameras look at me with a watchful eye. Behind them, there is a border road, on which every now and then an off-road car passes slowly, raising clouds of dust. Then there is the wall, the proper one, built for 1.6 billion zlotys, which we know from photos. In one of the spans, I see a culvert locked with large padlocks. That’s where people get pushed through. From the Belarusian side, several figures in uniforms and masks approach the wall, look around, and a while after disappear in the dense darkness of the forest. Just behind the wall, foreign territory is marked by a green-and-red border post, and a few dozen meters away, behind the trees, looms the Belarusian sistema, the forest cut across with a precise steel slash.

“A lot of people coming through?”

“As usual,” answers the Border Guard officer. I can only see his eyes, the rest of his face covered with a mask. “You’re late, there was a group a moment ago,” he adds after a while in a more sincere, calm voice. “I don’t understand how someone can go on such a journey.”

“Sometimes they probably have no other choice; where they come from, they are threatened with death.”

“Death is there, on the other side.” The guard points to the wall. “There must be one big cemetery out there. Sometimes, when I am standing by the wall, I hear screams and moans through the forest. Sometimes you can just smell it, you know…”

“What?”

“Corpses.”

The text was created with the support of the ZEIT STIFTUNG BUCERIUS.

The text was created in collaboration with the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Text and photos: Bartek Sabela
Editorial supervision: Magdalena Kicińska
Editing: Urszula Kifer
Fact-checking and infographics: Marcin Czajkowski
Digital publishing: Ewa Pluta

Sabela Bartek – (born in 1982), traveller, photographer, reporter, author of books, associated with “Pismo”. For a reportage Wszystkie ziarna piasku received “Bursztynowy Motyl” Award and was nominated for the Teresa Torańska “Newsweek” Prize for a reportage Wszystkie ziarna piasku; was awarded the Grand Press 2023 prize for Wędrówka tusz, a non-fiction book based on a series of reportages published in "Pismo".

Umed’s family: from left to right, son Hama, sister Xanda, Umed’s parents, wife Qaniha with their son Hama, and brother Rebaz.

Czytaj także

Addio, pomodori: What will we lose in the climate crisis?

Prisoners of the fourth floor

Refugee women from Syria take back their agency

-

-

-

Umed’s family: from left to right, son Hama, sister Xanda, Umed’s parents, wife Qaniha with their son Hama, and brother Rebaz.

Czytaj także

Addio, pomodori: What will we lose in the climate crisis?

Prisoners of the fourth floor

Refugee women from Syria take back their agency

Newsletter

Pismo na bieżąco

SPRAWDŹ SWOJĄ SKRZYNKĘ E-MAIL I POTWIERDŹ ZAPIS NA NEWSLETTER.

DZIĘKUJEMY! WKRÓTCE OTRZYMASZ NAJNOWSZE WYDANIE NASZEGO NEWSLETTERA.

Twoja rezygnacja z newslettera została zapisana.

WYŁĄCZNIE DLA OSÓB Z AKTYWNYM DOSTĘPEM ONLINE.

ABY SIĘ ZAPISAĆ MUSISZ MIEĆ WYKUPIONY DOSTĘP ONLINE.

DZIĘKUJEMY! WKRÓTCE OSOBA OTRZYMA DOSTĘP DO MATERIAŁU PISMA.

-

-

-