Migrants rescued from swamp on Polish-Belarus border as numbers rise
2:19 pm Tuesday, November 08th, 2022
WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland’s Border Guard rescued 10 people from a swamp on the border with Belarus on Tuesday, it said, as Warsaw warns that a new migrant crisis could erupt on its borders.
In 2021 a surge in migration from the Middle East and Africa via Belarus created a humanitarian crisis that Poland and the European Union said was deliberately created by Minsk in a bid to destabilise the bloc. Belarus has repeatedly denied flying in people and pushing them across the border.
With security concerns rising due to the war in Ukraine, Warsaw says it has noted increased migrant activity on the Belarus border and Polish officials suspect Minsk could again be involved.
Poland has also started building a razor-wire fence on its border with Kaliningrad as it believes the Russian exclave could be used as an illegal migration route.
“Today, Border Guard officers, in cooperation with other services, saved 10 foreigners during an extremely difficult operation,” the Border Guard said in a statement.
“In total, 8 Sri Lankan citizens, a Pakistani citizen and an Indian citizen were rescued.”
The number of daily attempted illegal crossings from Belarus reported by the Border Guard has regularly exceeded 100 in recent weeks, significantly above summer levels.
Poland has built a wall on the Belarus border and is in the process of installing cameras and sensors.
Border Guard spokeswoman Anna Michalska said she believed more migrants were trying to enter Poland before the electronic system is complete and makes border crossings harder.
“The Belarusian services and people connected to the regime of (Belarusian President Alexander) Lukashenko know this, and they want to recruit the biggest group of foreigners possible to make this journey,” she said.
Anna Alboth from Grupa Granica, an NGO which helps migrants, said the organisation had also seen more crossing attempts in the past four weeks, receiving more than 1,800 calls from migrants on the Polish side since the wall was completed.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)
