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Fight Belarus’s Lukashenko, Not Desperate Refugees

Fight Belarus’s Lukashenko, Not Desperate Refugees

The artificial refugee crisis on the Belarus-Polish border has taken an ugly turn for the worse: Social networks and media websites filled with videos of Polish troops repelling Middle Eastern refugees who were trying to get through barbed wire after thousands of them had marched toward Poland accompanied by Belarussian soldiers.

The escalation is new, but the situation has persisted for months. Everything about it has been illegal: the Polish pushbacks of people who are entitled by the European Convention on Human Rights to request asylum as well as the Belarussian “travel agencies,” encouraged by President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime, that sell “packages” to potential refugees, mostly Iraqis but also Syrians and Afghans — so much for a flight to Minsk and a Belarussian visa, so much for crossing into Poland, so much for a “taxi” to eastern Germany. Centrkurort, the state-owned Belarussian travel firm, has been named as one of these facilitators. Russia’s near-official support for the human trafficking is another blatant challenge to international laws and rules. Not only does Russia allow the refugee flights to Minsk over its territory, the Kremlin is advising Lukashenko on his moves: The Belarussian dictator discussed the situation with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Nov. 9. 

One hears a lot in Europe about “standing with Poland” to resist the Belarussian “weaponization” of vulnerable people. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s Twitter message threatening tougher sanctions on Belarus and on third-country airlines carrying the refugees to Minsk was also issued in Polish. But there’s only one Poland to “stand with”— the one whose nationalist government recently declared its laws superior to European Union ones, threatening the very existence of the EU; the one that has refused to accept refugees from the Middle East while welcoming “culturally close” Ukrainians to relieve labor market tension. When it comes to values, the EU cannot side with this Poland; the only common ground is fear of a major refugee crisis like the one in 2015 — every European politician’s nightmare.

Let’s be clear on one thing: It is not the refugees themselves that Lukashenko is weaponizing or, to use von der Leyen’s expression, “instrumentalizing.” These people have agency in the matter. They know what they’re getting into when they buy the tickets to Minsk or when they brave the Mediterranean’s winter storms; they’ll take any kind of help, even Lukashenko’s kind. They are taking a desperate gamble — and indeed, it’s paying off for some: German asylum applications are up significantly in September and October.

What’s being weaponized is fear of the Middle Eastern migrant.

The fear is partly justified by Europe’s failure to integrate the 2015 newcomers. Some two-thirds of Syrians and 44% of Afghans living in Germany draw long-term unemployment benefits. It’s hard to apportion blame for this: That the welfare recipient quota is so high in a country with a raging shortage of every kind of manual worker cannot be due entirely to the immigrants’ inability to adapt. It’s undeniable, though, that European education systems and labor markets were and are unprepared for mass immigration. 

For the most part, though, the fear is irrational. Germany, the biggest recipient of immigrants in 2015, barely blinked financially because of their arrival. Between the beginning of 2015 and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, there were, count ‘em, just three quarters in which the country didn’t run a budget surplus. And while there was a rise in crime, probably inevitable given the influx of young, indigent men, the general crime level is still significantly lower than in 2005.

Besides, not even Lukashenko would willingly open his small, poor country to a 2015-style flood of refugees; and at some point, he’d run out of people willing to pay the “travel agencies’” prices — an essential element of the scheme, given that the refugees are ferried to Minsk by air. From a humanitarian and financial point of view, Europe, and Germany in particular, could take in all those poor frozen souls from the Polish border. Its politicians just don’t want to — because they have bad six-year-old memories, don’t want to be seen as soft in the face of Lukashenko, or are openly or tacitly anti-Muslim.

Yet the instinct to put up barbed wire, send troops and intensify pushbacks is fruitless because these “solutions” are unsustainable. With 86% of the world’s 26.4 million refugees living in developing countries and 27% in the least developed ones, according to the United Nations, Europe cannot hold out forever against this overhang of desperation without turning itself into an impregnable fortress. 

There’s also a moral issue involved.

Commenting on the Belarus-Poland border crisis, Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, trolled that Poland should accept a few thousand “grateful Iraqis” as penance for its soldiers’ participation in U.S.-led operations in Iraq. That’s not much more than the mockery of a malicious clown — it’s not as if Russia welcomed with open arms the Syrians who fled towns and villages flattened by Russian bombing raids. But, just like Russia or, say, Turkey, the European countries that have taken part in the U.S. wars in the Middle East do share a moral responsibility to the wars’ victims. It doesn’t necessarily matter to people driven from their homes whether a country fought on the right or the wrong side; the immediate, unbearable misery is what matters. And if people’s happiness — not defined narrowly as the happiness of natural-born citizens — is among a country’s goals, it should not be averse to helping out.

Speaking of Turkey: Though it has been accused of weaponizing migrants, too, and its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used them as a bargaining chip for billions of euros in EU financial support, it’s generally doing its bit. At an economic price that’s more significant to it than, say, to Germany, it houses the world’s biggest refugee population of 3.7 million. Muslim solidarity — essentially just a rhetorical wrapper around human compassion — has at least as much to do with this as the EU cash.

Europe must fight the Lukashenko regime, which is as illegitimate and cruel as any tyranny much further away from the EU’s borders. But the current EU sanctions against it are relatively mild, purporting mainly to hit Lukashenko’s suppression apparatus. If the goal is to pressure the dictator, there’s plenty of room for toughening sanctions while still helping people in extreme need — not just the Middle Easterners but also Belarussians fleeing the regime. And taking them in would be a powerful symbolic gesture, a moral blow to Lukashenko and Putin — even if they are desensitized to such blows.

It’s finally time not just for Europe but for the entire Western world to start working on lasting solutions to the refugee crisis, which would necessarily include more generous immigration policies — accompanied by adjustments to education systems and labor market regulation — as well as increased, systematic, targeted investment in countries that neighbor the world’s disaster areas. The heroic efforts to defend borders against unarmed people are, when all is said and done, a disgrace.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation team based in Berlin. He was previously Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He recently authored a Russian translation of George Orwell's "1984."

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