Warsaw, Poland Nov. 9 (BUS): Hundreds if not thousands of migrants sought to storm the border from Belarus into Poland on Monday, cutting a barbed wire fence and using branches to try to climb over it. The blockade has escalated a crisis along the EU’s eastern border that has been simmering for months.
The Polish Interior Ministry said it rejected the illegal invasion and claimed the situation was under control. The Ministry of Defense released a video showing an armed Polish officer using chemical spray across the fence on men trying to cut barbed wire. Some immigrants threw objects at the police.
Video footage from Belarusian media showed people using long wooden poles or twigs to try to get past the border fence while police helicopters hovered overhead, according to the Associated Press.
Video footage taken by the Defense Ministry later on Monday showed the migrants settling at night at the border after setting up dozens of tents and cooking meals.
Polish border officials said the border crossing at Koznica in the northeast will be closed as early as Tuesday.
There was no way to independently verify what was happening, and the crowding of people at the border seemed to escalate the months-long crisis.
Anton Bychkovsky, a spokesman for Belarus’s state border guard commission, told The Associated Press that migrants at the border are seeking “to exercise their right to apply for refugee status in the European Union.” Bychkovsky insisted that they “do not pose a security threat”.
But Poland and other European countries, including Germany, viewed the huge group as a threat by many nations.
The European Union has said it hopes Poland will finally accept help from the bloc’s border agency, a move Poland’s ruling nationalists have so far refused to take. Frontex did not comment on the border situation on Monday.
In Washington, US State Department spokesman Ned Price expressed concern over “disturbing images and reports emanating from the Belarus-Poland border.”
Poland’s Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said on Twitter that more than 12,000 soldiers had been deployed to the border and a volunteer regional defense force had been put on alert. He also posted video footage of what appeared to be a large group of immigrants in Belarus near Kuznica.
Polish ministers held an emergency meeting on the border crisis, with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki writing on Facebook that Poland’s borders are “sacred” and “not just a line on the map”.
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski held talks with Iraqi Chargé d’Affairs Hussein Al-Safi on ways to end the migration crisis, and thanked Iraq for Belarus’s closing of its consulates in Baghdad and Erbil that grant tourist visas to immigrants.
Meanwhile, in Lithuania, which borders Poland in the European Union, officials have been preparing for the possibility of a similar incursion, with the Interior Ministry proposing to declare a state of emergency.
“We are preparing for all possible scenarios,” said Rustamas Lyubaivas, chief of the Lithuanian border guards.
Since the summer, Poland and Lithuania have seen thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa trying to cross into the European Union. Poland sought to obstruct attempts or return those captured to Belarus.
RAE