Poland began constructing a fence along its border with Belarus on Tuesday to block the entry of illegal migrants. The fence will be 5.5 meters high, 186 kilometers long, and will cost 350 million euros to build. Poland and Belarus share a 418-kilometer border.
The Polish parliament decided in November to erect a border barrier in response to the thousands of migrants who have been attempting to cross the Polish border from Belarus since last summer.
The new fence will be equipped with cameras and motion detectors to assist border guards in preventing human smuggling. “The temporary fence (made of barbed wire) has already helped us a lot because it gave us time to prepare while a group of migrants was about to attack, to open a passage, and time to mobilize sufficient resources and personnel to prevent this,” said a spokesperson for the border guard. Construction is expected to be completed in June.
The project has raised concerns among human rights and environmental activists. The former fear that migrants fleeing conflict situations will be unable to apply for asylum, while the latter worry about the negative impact on the natural forest area along the border.
The European Union has accused Belarus of facilitating illegal immigration to EU countries in retaliation for sanctions imposed during the disputed August 2020 presidential elections, the subsequent harsh crackdown on peaceful protests, and the hijacking of a commercial plane to arrest a prominent opposition journalist.
Thousands of migrants, mostly from the Middle East, including Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon, but also from Afghanistan, attempted to cross the Polish border into the EU last year.
Frontex, the EU border agency, detected nearly 8,000 illegal border crossings last year via borders with Belarus – Poland, Lithuania, Latvia. This is a thousand times more than the previous year. About a dozen migrants have since died at the border.
Poland has declared a state of emergency at its border, restricting access to the area for journalists and aid organizations, thereby removing oversight of the unfolding crisis.