Poland Starts Building Wall On Border With Belarus

KUZNICA, Poland (AP) — Poland has started building a $394 million wall on its eastern border intended to block migrants pushed by Belarus, in what the European Union calls a “hybrid attack,” from crossing illegally into EU territory.

Reporters were allowed to see the work in the guarded area on Thursday.

Pressure from thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa on Poland’s and Lithuania’s wooded border with Belarus began in the summer, leading to clashes with Poland’s border guards. Poland has sealed its border with Belarus using razor wire and increased the number of guards. International efforts have been taken to warn off migrants seeking to enter the EU from Belarus. The migrants are mostly headed for Germany.

The EU says the migrants are being used by Belarus’ authoritarian leader to destabilize the 27-member bloc in retaliation for the West’s sanctions on Minsk following an election internationally consider as rigged, and a clampdown on opposition.

At least 12 migrants have died in the bogs and forests of the border area and conditions have gotten worse in the sub-freezing winter temperatures.

Poland’s 5.5 meter (18 ft) high metal wall topped with barbed wire is to run more than 180 kilometers (115 miles) along the land part of the border with Belarus, which also includes the Bug River as a frontier. Two construction companies are to work on it around the clock, starting in four different locations. It is due to be completed in June, at the cost of some 1.6 billion zlotys ($394 million.)

The work comes at a time when European nations are debating stepping up external border protection and regulations for returning migrants with no permission to stay to their countries of origin, if the countries are safe.

Critics and environmentalists say the wall will fail to stop migrants, but will do harm to one of Europe’s last pristine woodlands, the Bialowieza forest.

Natalia Gebert of the Grupa Granica (The Border Group) that brings aid to migrants and asylum-seekers in Poland, says the group is “absolutely against” the wall.

“The wall stops only the disabled, the weak, the sick. It doesn’t stop desperate people who are fleeing danger from trying to cross,” Gebert told The Associated Press.

She said that in the first three weeks of 2022 the group received requests for help from nearly 350 people, including 51 children.

Kalina Czwarnog of the Ocalenie (Deliverance) Foundation said the money for the wall could be better spent on ways of managing migration in a “humanitarian way and in line with the international law.”