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The story of migrants on the EU-Belarus border
Using exclusive data, geolocation, phone records, videos, documents and interviews, the BIRN team pieced together the complex realities of those trapped between global politics and the devastating asylum policy towards migrants at the Poland-Belarus border.
It’s almost midnight in a forest near the village of Narewka, located about 10 kilometres from Poland’s eastern border with Belarus on the edge of the Bialowieza forest, and a family of Iraqi Kurds are squatting, holding their breath each time a car passes on the nearest street or if footsteps are heard.
The three children in the group, aged between five and six, understand the situation clearly: as soon as an adult whispers “police, shh!”, the kids quieten down right away and lie low. During those seconds, the only audible sounds are one’s own heartbeat and the creaking and groaning of the tall, thin birch trees swaying in the wind.
The family also includes a sick mother, who is lying on the ground, a teenage daughter who speaks English, and two uncles.
In the two weeks before this chilly night in mid-November, this group had been roaming around the forests, pushed back and forth between Belarus and Poland multiple times. Temperatures at night are already dropping below zero and everyone’s clothes are wet, including the children’s. They have long ago run out of food.
The family are hiding because they fear that if the Polish border guards find them, they will force them back into Belarus, as has happened before. They hope to be able to organise a car to drive them into Germany, but they’re not really sure how to do that.
Tens of thousands of asylum seekers and migrants, primarily from the Middle East and Afghanistan, tried to enter the EU in the second half of 2021 and early 2022 via the Belarusian borders with Poland and the Baltic countries. Over 10,000 of them have made it to Western Europe, some* are in Poland waiting for responses to their asylum applications, including in detention centres, hundreds were estimated to still be in Belarus in early 2022, and at least 5,000 were returned to their home countries, according to the European Commission.
The Belarusian regime’s instrumentalisation of the migrants, as a way to put pressure on the EU after it imposed sanctions on Minsk for rigging the 2020 presidential election, was suspected from the start of the crisis in the summer of 2021. However, it became glaringly obvious in mid-November, when online footage posted by the Polish authorities and migrants themselves showed clear interventions by Belarusian soldiers to gather the migrants in larger groups, direct them to specific locations and pressure them to storm the Polish border.
From the outset of the crisis, Poland’s approach has been to militarise the border and push migrants back into Belarus, in defiance of the Geneva Convention of 1951, and European and national legislation. This has been done, for the most part, with the EU’s consent. It led to a situation where the Belarusians would get the migrants to try again and again to cross, only to see them repeatedly pushed back by Poland.
Pushed back and forth, in some cases as many as 20 times, many people ended up spending weeks roaming around the forests and fields between Belarus, Poland and Lithuania, sometimes having no clear idea where they were or where it was safe to go. Oftentimes, they could be found walking around on extremely difficult terrain – for example, in the primaeval Bialowieza forest with its thick cover of vegetation, fallen trees and deep marshes – in harsh conditions like the cold, rain and even snow, without shelter or dry clothes, food, medicine or even drinking water.
At least 20 migrants are known to have died on the Polish-Belarusian border, including an infant and a pregnant woman. Several women are documented to have miscarried in the forests, parents were seen desperate after losing their children (a Syrian family even lost their dead baby), families were separated.
Doctors treating the people emerging from the forests have repeatedly diagnosed hypothermia, sometimes leading to death. Many, including children, some with disabilities, have been left to drag their weakened bodies through the marshes. A vast range of health problems has been documented by doctors and activists, from heart issues or gangrene in the feet, to panic attacks and other psychological issues.
Migrants have been victims of violence on both sides of the border, particularly the Belarusian side. From beatings and being threatened at gunpoint on the Belarusian side, to being chased away by dogs, verbally insulted or having their phones, the only means of orientation, broken on the Polish side, these people were trapped in a cycle of violence for weeks on end.
Many individual stories have been documented so far, but the dimension of the trauma was largely hidden from sight by the manner in which authorities, both in Belarus and in Poland and the Baltics, dealt with the situation. In Poland, the access of journalists and external observers, including from international human rights organisations, to a 3-kilometre-wide stretch of land along the border with Belarus has been blocked for months: that’s exactly where most of the suffering took place.
Using data provided by Polish activists offering humanitarian aid to the asylum seekers and migrants, and interviews conducted on the Belarus-Poland and Poland-Germany borders in the second half of 2021, we intend to highlight the scale of the trauma experienced by so many in those border forests that took place largely out of sight of the public.
We publish this project at a time when the world is transfixed at the unfolding horror of the war in Ukraine, with over 5.5 million refugees so far forced to leave their country. Though there are shortcomings, those fleeing Ukraine are mostly receiving the help and support they need during this traumatic time. This global mobilisation, however, puts into even sharper relief the suffering of the displaced in our story, whom Poland and Europe have been so reluctant to help.
In late March, as people in Poland and across the world were fully mobilising to help fleeing Ukrainians, the Belarusian regime decided to close down the Bruzgi camp, where hundreds from the Middle East and Afghanistan had been residing throughout the winter. Polish activists were reporting at the time daily interactions with migrants who had crossed into Poland. In many cases, the migrants trying to cross were families with children, as well as those with disabilities; those left behind at Bruzgi were the most vulnerable. The Polish authorities responded, in typical fashion, with pushbacks. In multiple cases documented by activists, people with severe disabilities, such as tetraplegia, or children suffering from infections were pushed back during the month of March. With people still trying to cross into the EU from Belarus at the time of publishing, that approach continues to this day.
#border🇵🇱🇧🇾
This morning, in the section #PSGKuźnica, four groups of foreigners crossed the border from🇧🇾 to🇵🇱 illegally - 23 immigrants were detained: Iraq, Iran, Yemen and Syria. This month there have already been 624 attempts to illegally get into the territory🇵🇱.
# Helping🇺🇦 Last night on March 1st, 98,000 people from Ukraine travelled to Poland. From February 24, border guards gave right to enter to over 453,000 people running from war-torn Ukraine. #borderguardhelps #solidarni with Ukraine
The precise number of people who tried to enter Poland via the Belarusian border is not known. The Polish state has not publicised nor, to the best of our knowledge, even compiled those statistics. If such a record was kept, it would offer an indication of the number of potential asylum-seekers who were denied their right to register a request for international protection – a right enshrined in the 1951 Geneva Convention that Poland signed, as well as in EU and national legislation.
The Polish government, however, did calculate that, over 2021, it “prevented” 39,674 “attempts to illegally cross from Belarus into Poland”. That does not equate to the number of people who attempted to enter, however, as many of the migrants, having been pushed back, made repeated attempts to cross into Poland.
Given the lack of transparency by the Polish government over the issue, we have had to rely on data provided by Grupa Granica, a coalition of Polish NGOs and activists who have been offering humanitarian aid to the migrants. By analysing information on over 4,000 migrants who tried to cross into Poland during 2021 and 2022, including their geographical coordinates in Poland, BIRN has been able to put together a picture that is representative of who the migrants were and what difficulties they encountered as they tried to enter the EU.
The data set compiled by Grupa Granica only includes information on a proportion of the total number of migrants that crossed the Belarus-Polish border since the summer of 2021. Many never contacted activists at all and some contacted other groups. However, we believe this data set to be the most comprehensive that exists given Grupa Granica is the largest entity working to assist migrants on this border. This is the first time significant parts of this data set have been made public.
Zooming in on this sub-group, we analyse geolocation data provided by the migrants themselves to BIRN over a period of time to show how the Polish authorities forced them back into Belarus, sometimes more than once.
Unfortunately, anyone storing geolocation data from both sides of the border opens themselves up to possible prosecution for facilitating illegal entry into Poland – there are currently several such ongoing cases against activists. As such, we are not able to show the real scale of this phenomenon using this type of data.
What we have been able to do, however, is to go through hundreds of intervention reports written by Grupa Granica activists after meeting migrants and offering them assistance. BIRN only read reports dating from mid-December 2021 to mid-April 2022: we found that in around a third of the cases, the groups of migrants contacting activists had already experienced pushbacks or were pushed back while in contact with the activists.
The figure of one-third, however, should be considered an underestimate of the true proportion of migrants experiencing pushbacks. In many cases, the activists simply did not have the opportunity to interview the migrants given the poor conditions they found them in, or did not have the opportunity to ask them about pushbacks specifically.
The more accurate interpretation of the figure is that one-third of the migrants who contacted Grupa Granica during this period experienced pushbacks by Polish border guards, many multiple times; for the other two-thirds, there is either no information available or there were no pushbacks reported to the activists – neither of which means it didn’t happen.
BIRN analysed data on 4,020 migrants who crossed into Polish territory from Belarus in the second half of 2021 and the first half of 2022, made available by Grupa Granica. Given evidence that tens of thousands attempted to cross this border during the period, this sample represents only a proportion of the total. It is, however, large enough to give an indication of who the people trying to cross the border were and the problems they faced.
The pushback of migrants trying to enter Europe has become common; several governments, including Greece and Hungary, have been shown to engage in this practice over the last few years.
The particularity of the Belarus-EU situation, however, comes in the form of what has been described as a process of “ping pong” with migrants crossing the border. Many of the migrants interviewed by BIRN, other media, or international organisations such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, reported being pushed back time and again by the Polish authorities, despite expressing a clear intent to apply for asylum in the country.
The moment of one such pushback was even captured on video by the Syrian migrants themselves:
as they are driven back to the border in the Polish border guards’ vehicle after being apprehended, they repeatedly request international protection in Poland, only for the guards to respond with verbal abuse.
Boushra al-Moallem↗ from Syria, interviewed by BIRN, also witnessed repeated pushbacks. She captured on video the moment when Polish border guards, accompanied by dogs, scared away a large group of migrants, which included children, whose cries can be heard in the background.
Bahaddin Qadir, a political activist from Iraqi Kurdistan, who told BIRN he survived two murder attempts back home, was pushed back despite spending a night at a border guard station in Poland where he requested asylum and explained the danger he would face if he was sent back to Iraq. We track his route on the border to illustrate the pushback.
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First attempt to cross the border around the villages of Tokari (BE)/Tokary (PL): Bahaddin was in Tokari on the Belarusian side and tried to cross into Poland from somewhere close to there in the evening, but could not pass as he was beaten up by Belarusian border guards
Bahaddin took a taxi to Brest (BE), then Minsk, spent one night in Minsk in a hotel, then went back to Brest the next day Nov 5
Bahaddin spent the evening inside a cafe in Brest until midnight when he wanted to cross the border across to Terespol; he walked to the bridge across the Bug, hoping to cross into Poland but saw a tank on the bridge, got scared and gave up.
For a while Bahaddin was inside the jungle, and then ended up in this big hall at Bruzgi. He was there until this last attempt to cross the border.
He swam across the Bug, was intercepted by the Poles as soon as he got into Poland and spent the night in Poland at a border guard post. The next morning he was forced back into Belarus.
In another case we have detailed information about, a group of nine people from Iraq, Syria and Turkey were pushed back into Belarus by the Polish authorities on December 23, despite already having spent at least four days in Poland and one of them suffering from hypothermia. Before the pushback, none was given the chance to request asylum in Poland. According to their account, the group had earlier had to abandon in the Bialowieza forest in the border area one of their companions, a man from Yemen, who had died.
These cases are just a few examples indicating that the Polish policy of “preventing the entry” of “illegal migrants” has been indiscriminate, giving little opportunity to officially request international protection, even for those who had a credible claim for asylum.
As many actors, ranging from the Polish Ombudsman to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other international human rights groups, have pointed out, this practice is in breach of the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Rights of Refugees, which obliges signatory countries, such as Poland, to offer protection to those in need reaching their territory. This implies the person claiming asylum has the right to have their request registered and individually assessed.
Beyond the Geneva Convention, the Polish border practices are also in breach of EU and Polish legislation, which implements the convention’s principles into European and national law.
38-year-old Avin Irfan Zahir↗ died on December 3 in a hospital in Hajnowka, a small town in eastern Poland, close to the Bialowieza forest, leaving five surviving children and after earlier losing an unborn sixth one. Avin was brought to hospital on November 12 after being found by volunteers from Grupa Granica and Medycy na Granicy (a group of volunteer doctors) hiding with her family in the forest. They said they wanted to avoid being detected by Polish border guards and pushed back into Belarus.
According to a report issued by Medycy na Granicy, when she was found, Avin was unconscious and battling to stay alive. In her second trimester, she had a body temperature of 28.8°C, which indicates severe, life-threatening hypothermia; as was later diagnosed, she was also suffering from acidosis, a condition caused by starvation which can lead to the foetus’s death (she had not eaten and had been vomiting water for two days when found). By the time she was discovered, Avin’s unborn baby had already died and she had apparently been walking around the forest with the deceased foetus in her belly for days. Doctors also said the indications were she had fallen into water, probably in the marshes of Bialowieza.
Two days after being admitted to hospital, Avin had the dead foetus removed, but her life could not be saved and she died almost three weeks later.
Avin is just one of at least 20 people known to have died on the Polish-Belarusian border since the crisis began in the summer of 2021.
One of the most recent deaths took place in February 2022, when most of the world had the feeling the crisis was over. The victim was 26-year-old Ahmed Al-Shawafi, who was found dead on February 22 in the Bialowieza forest, in a difficult-to-access area because of the marshes. Ahmed was traveling in a larger group that included children, which was later pushed back into Belarus by the Polish guards, according to their accounts. Before being thrown out of Poland, the group managed to send to the Polish border guards the pin with the location of Ahmed’s dead body.
The youngest victim identified was a one-year-old Syrian child, about whose death volunteers from the Polish Center for International Aid informed first on November 18. On that day, the parents were found in the forest, the mother with a stab wound in her leg and the father with a laceration on his arm. The parents informed the volunteer doctors that they had been roaming around the forest for six weeks, during which the child died and its body was lost.
A report published in December 2021, entitled “Curing refugees”, based on interviews with doctors that treated migrants in hospitals near the Polish-Belarusian border during that year, lists the types of medical problems most often suffered by the victims:
In an emotional intervention in the Polish Sejm (parliament), Jakub Sieczko, the Warsaw anesthesiologist who coordinated the volunteer doctors’ group Medycy na Granicy, spoke about the difficulties of treating the migrants in the forest, even if doctors do manage to reach them. Addressing directly members of the parliament who are themselves doctors, Sieczko asked:
Aland, a 20-year-old Iraqi, is taken to the emergency ward of the hospital in Bielsk Podlaski, near the Polish-Belarusian border, eastern Poland, November 19, 2021.
“The worst was their physical state,” one of the doctors interviewed for the same report, “Curing refugees”, recounted. “They do not expect kind gestures. They say thank you for everything, for each human gesture.”
Other doctors describe migrants’ extreme fear of being sent back to Belarus, complete with panic attacks at the hospital, in one case endangering the patient’s life (that person told doctors his brother had died in his arms on the border, according to the interview with the doctor quoted in the report). This is consistent with multiple accounts from migrants and asylum seekers collected by BIRN in six months of reporting, some of whom shook uncontrollably when relating their experiences.
Bahaddin↗, a 47-year-old Kurd who took up arms against Saddam’s Iraq and said he had survived two assassination attempts back home, cried uncontrollably on the phone after his friends had been put on a plane back to Iraq and he was left alone at Minsk airport.
Mohammed↗, whom BIRN met in the safety of a refugee centre in Bialystok, insisted throughout the interview he could still be sent back to Belarus together with his pregnant wife and three children, despite having lodged an asylum claim.
Boushra↗, who described having a panic attack that left her breathless after being apprehended by Polish border guards, said she was still having trouble sleeping weeks later, even after having reached the safety of a refugee centre in the Netherlands.
After playing for two hours in the snow with his brothers and the BIRN team in Bialystok, the first words uttered by Gharib, the 13-year-old son of Avin, the Iraqi Kurdish woman who had died in early December, were: “My mother is dead. Her body is back in Iraq.”↗
All migrants who have attempted to cross the Polish-Belarusian border were victims of structural violence. The experience of being trapped for an indefinite period of time, with no support or supplies, between two borders, sealed and guarded by armed soldiers, of countries that do not recognise basic human rights.
But many were victims of more direct forms of violence too. Bahhadin↗ described being beaten by armed Belarusian men with a wire, threatened at gunpoint and having his fingers held between the blades of scissors as a threat. The two Iraqi men BIRN interviewed in Frankfurt-Oder, who were trying to cross the border during November as the Belarusian regime massed migrants at specific locations to get them to storm into Poland, were threatened if they didn’t comply with orders.
Boushra↗ also recounted how she was accompanied by armed Belarusian men to a hospital where she was expected to translate and the constant feeling there was no choice but to obey their orders. Mohammed described other people being beaten up around him on the Belarusian side, while he clutched his children and stayed quiet to avoid becoming a target himself.
Guards on both sides of the border used dogs to scare away refugees: while the bites treated by Polish doctors reportedly happened on the Belarusian side, Boushra’s videos, for example, clearly show Polish border guards chasing away migrants, including crying children, with dogs.
Based on BIRN interviews, Polish border guards mostly abstained from physical violence during this period. However, in certain case the psychological abuse is clear. The video of a pushback filmed by Syrian refugees and published by Grupa Granica captures the aggressive language used by Polish border guards, complete with expletives and curses hurled at the migrants, who are begging to be allowed to apply for asylum.
Boushra↗ describes how, during one of the pushbacks, Polish border guards mocked her and her sisters for hoping to get to the West. Another time the guards failed to help Boushra for tens of minutes despite having fallen to the ground and being unable to breathe during a panic attack. Bahaddin says he was treated very humanely by Polish border guards at the station after he was apprehended, being offered warm tea and dry clothes; at the same time, however, he says the Polish authorities took away his phone for an entire night and returned it devoid of data, including precious photos of his family.
Together with Grupa Granica, the Ocalenie Foundation is one of the main Polish groups that have been assisting migrants on the Polish-Belarusian border since August 2021. Both Grupa Granica and the Ocalenie Foundation have cooperated in providing humanitarian aid to the migrants alongside numerous locals living inside the restricted “emergency zone”, the few allowed by the authorities to move freely in the 3-kilometre stretch of land along the border with Belarus. Ocalenie activists could only administer aid to migrants once they had exited the “emergency zone” and were well into Polish territory. They provided them with basic humanitarian aid as well as legal assistance in case the migrants expressed a desire to apply for asylum in Poland. Here, Piotr Bystrianin, the head of Ocalenie, who personally took part in tens, if not hundreds, of interventions to provide basic humanitarian and legal aid, describes his experiences on the border as well as discusses the larger issues that caused this humanitarian crisis.
For the most part, the European Commission has backed Poland and the Baltic states’ approach of closing the borders. The position became more nuanced after the first dead bodies started showing up on the border in late September 2021, with individual commissioners, such as EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johanssen, stressing the need to secure the borders and respect human rights at the same time.
The Belarus-EU migration crisis happened against a backdrop of the EU for years tightening its migration policy by investing in the militarisation of its external borders and striking deals with third countries to prevent migrants from even reaching Europe’s borders. As a consequence, the international rights of refugees have been gradually weakened.
It could be argued that, in this context, the Polish situation was a further step in this process of undermining migrant rights. For example, the blanket denial of registering asylum claims combined with the repeated (and numerous) pushbacks of the same individuals over a short span of time constitutes a development quite specific to this context.
It is important to note, too, that Polish border guards conducted many of their border-securing operations using EU money.
With Russia invading Ukraine at the end of February, a new migration crisis is happening in Europe. Over 5.5 million Ukrainian refugees have escaped their country, a majority of them heading to Poland, which was already hosting a community of over a million Ukrainians before the war started.
Poland’s mobilisation to help Ukrainian refugees, at least in the early days of the war, has been exemplary. But it does raise some uncomfortable questions about the country’s (and the EU’s) toughness shown towards migrants from the Middle East and Africa.
The massive mobilisation witnessed for the Ukrainian refugees solves at least one puzzle about Poland’s reluctant attitude to refugees in the past: it’s not a matter of capacity.
Like other countries in the region, Poland has resolutely opposed an EU open-door policy to asylum seekers and migrants from outside the continent. Part of Warsaw’s rhetoric, including during 2015 when Syrians were fleeing the war in their country, has been that countries like Poland in Europe’s east are still too poor to help.
Today, however, it’s become evident that if there is a will, there is a way. In March, Poland was managing to offer first aid and house up to 100,000 refugees per day. Rallied by the central government, municipalities across the country were preparing accommodation and regular citizens were filling the gaps.
Ukrainian refugees at the Humanitarian Aid Center in Nadarzyn. EPA-EFE/ALBERT ZAWADA
Border guards stand next to Afghan asylum seekers near the town of Usnarz Gorny, north-west Poland, 19 August 2021. EPA-EFE/ARTUR RESZKO
In comparison to the size of the current refugee wave from Ukraine, last year’s “migration crisis” was tiny. Throughout
last year, the Polish Border Guard said it had “prevented” over 39,000 “attempted entries” into Poland from Belarus. That number does not equate to those trying to enter, as many attempted to cross the border several times after being pushed back into Belarus. In all of last year, the number of people from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa trying to enter Poland was smaller than the number of refugees from Ukraine who crossed in a single day.
While proponents for sealing the EU’s border with Belarus argue that those who chose this route are primarily economic migrants, our project shows the situation is much more complex. At least some of the people who were pushed back would have been granted refugee status had they been allowed to apply.
Data on over 4,000 migrants who tried to enter Poland via Belarus in the second half of last year that BIRN examined shows a large number of Syrians, Yemenis and children, for example. Bahaddin↗, an Iraqi Kurd who claimed he survived two recent assassination attempts for his political activism and would be at risk of being killed if returned home, should at least have had his asylum claim examined by EU authorities, under international and EU law.
EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson said in January, during a meeting of the LIBE Committee in the European Parliament, referring to the Polish approach to migrants entering via Belarus, that even in a situation of ‘instrumentalization’ they still had the right to access to the asylum procedure.
“We still have to stay true to our values and our Treaty when it comes to the best interests of the child, protecting the vulnerable and so on,” she said. “In an instrumentalization situation, most people are probably not refugees. But we don’t know that, because to define whether a person is a refugee or not, they have to have access to the asylum procedure.”
The most glaring difference between the Ukrainians who are crossing into Poland today and the Syrians still stuck between the Belarusian and Polish borders at the time of publishing this project, or those fleeing in 2015 when Poland also rejected them, is not the degree of devastation of their respective countries, but their race, religion and culture.
*Neither the Polish Border Guard nor the Polish Office for Foreigners made the numbers of people who crossed the Belarus-Polish border and are still waiting for asylum in Poland available to BIRN as per request. The Polish government does not publicise statistics which would separate asylum seekers entering via this border from others.
Throughout six months of reporting, the Polish Ministry of Interior has not provided answers about individual cases of pushbacks BIRN inquired about, arguing it cannot provide details about specific cases to third parties. It has not provided information about surveillance equipment purchased with EU funds, nor even responded to a freedom of information request filed by BIRN on the topic.
On being asked by BIRN about the pushbacks during a press conference, a spokesperson for the Polish Border Guard argued that most of the people whose “entry was prevented” had never even crossed over into Polish territory. That is a line maintained by the Polish government throughout this crisis, especially until the national legislation legalising pushbacks was passed.
In its various responses to questions addressed by BIRN about this crisis, spokespersons for the European Commission have emphasised the need to protect borders at the same time as respecting human rights, while also saying the Commission is closely monitoring the situation in Poland.
A project by:
Text: Claudia Ciobanu
Photos and videos: Jaap Arriens
Data journalist: Ornaldo Gjergji
'Role of EU': Apostolis Fotiadis
Editor: Nick Watson
UI and data visualization: Olivia Solis
Development by:kutia.net
Project manager:Dragana Obradovic
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