kravietz 🦇Two articles were recently published in #Poland media about the situation at the #Belarus border[^1][^2], which largely confirm what I have repeatedly written myself based on monitoring the chats of Middle Eastern human traffickers.
The first article is based on the materials of the investigation against four activists from Hajnówka and confirms the following facts:
- There was no ‘accidental meeting of people in the forest’. The activists are in constant contact with the smugglers and pick up their clients at an agreed place.
- They were caught because one person had carelessly not deleted a message from their phone.
- The Belarusian KGB brings the clients to the Polish border and even kindly cuts through the Polish border fence for them.
- Polish activists not only provide assistance and guide smuggled people on the Polish side, but also drive them in their cars beyond the border zone and hand them over to the right smuggler, who takes them the rest of the way.
The migrants are not ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘refugees’, as Western media often refers to them. The smugglers sell them the whole package as a trip abroad: fake passports, a visa for Russia or Belarus, a flight ticket to Minsk, equipment for crossing the border, etc.
It is a perfectly organised business that generates profits for organised crime in the Middle East and the EU, as well as the Russian FSB and the Belarusian KGB, which control these smuggling channels.
Polish activist groups “Grupa Granica” and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights claim that this is ‘humanitarian aid’. In my opinion, the boundaries of humanitarian aid have long been crossed here and this is simply conscious participation in organised, illegal human trafficking, which is managed by organised crime and the secret services of countries that are definitely hostile to the EU.
It also does not matter whether they do it for ideological or financial reasons, the result is the same - it is not only allowing people into Poland and the EU without any control, but also favouring those who want to avoid this control and are likely to join the black market or, at best, the grey market.
It is also important to note that it is possible to enter the EU legally, including with a work permit. Thousands of people do this - for example, 17,000 Turkish citizens, 26,000 Georgians, 23,000 Indians and hundreds of thousands of others migrated to Poland legally etc.[^3]
These people spent less money on it than the fees charged by Arab smugglers and the KGB, and they have a regular status and legal documents. The activities of the activists undermine this process and negate the whole point of border control by allowing completely random and potentially dangerous people without any background checks.
A few days ago, the former deputy of the Poland’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Hanna Machińska, was asked by a journalist about ‘whose rights she was actually defending at the border’ and she replied that, in fact, ‘every human life is worth the same’.
I completely disagree with this statement because the lives of the mercenaries from the ‘Wagner Group’ who enter[^4] via the ‘green border’ are not worth ‘as much’ as the lives of civilians they murdered or will murder. Similarly, the life of an anonymous murderer of private Mateusz Sitko, Polish border guard stabbed to death by one of the attackers on the border, is not worth as much as the life of his victim.
Some people want to participate in building a democratic society, others don’t give a damn or want to destroy it outright, and lumping them together undermines the values on which that society is based.
[^3]: https://migracje.gov.pl
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