Insight
Lukashenka is the problem, not the migrants
by Ian Bond, Camino Mortera-Martinez, Luigi Scazzieri and Katia Glod, 12 Novemberber 2021 The crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border is artificially manufactured. Europe needs to focus on the cause of the problem – Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s desire to strike back at the EU. It is wrong to call what is happening at the border between Poland and Belarus a migration crisis, or to compare it to Europe’s situation in 2015 and 2016. Back then, over a million people entered Europe irregularly, mostly by sea. The 2015 crisis was driven by the conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan, and instability in parts of Africa. Neighbouring countries such as Libya, Morocco and Turkey tried, then and subsequently, to use their ability to stop the flow of migrants to extract concessions from the EU, but they themselves were not responsible for the initial surge in migration. By contrast, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the Belarusian dictator, has deliberately transported large numbers of migrants to the border between Belarus and its EU neighbours Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. That is a new phenomenon. Europe therefore needs to concentrate on the root of the problem, rather than the arrival of non-European migrants. The current situation is the latest phase in a confrontation between the EU and Belarus that began with the rigged re-election of Lukashenka in August 2020. The EU refused to recognise Lukashenka’s new presidential term as legitimate. In response to Lukashenka’s electoral malpractice and violent suppression of peaceful protests by his security forces, the Union has so far imposed sanctions on more than 100 individuals as well as a number of key state-owned enterprises. Several member-states have imposed visa bans on additional individuals associated with the regime. Lukashenka gave the EU advance notice in June 2021 of how he planned to retaliate for these measures: in a speech marking the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, he said that European countries expect Belarus to assist in combating illegal migration, but “you are strangling us, systematically and collectively, ruining us, trying to kill our economy”. The regime then suspended all migration co-operation with the EU. That month, several hundred migrants, mostly from Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, crossed from Belarus into Lithuania; 2,900 people followed in July, according to the EU border agency Frontex. Smaller numbers crossed into Latvia. Both Latvia and Lithuania imposed states of emergency as they tried to deal with a problem neither had previously had much experience of, and both sought and received assistance from Frontex. In September, Lithuania reported only 20 irregular crossings from Belarus. CER INSIGHT: Lukashenka is the problem, not the migrants 12 November 2021
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