WARSAW
As we drive deeper into the forest, The Fall’s song Totally Wired comes on the car radio. Are Belarusian DJs deliberately taunting us by weaponizing frontman Mark E. Smith over the barbed wire fence separating our “civilization” and their barbaric “East”?
The “East” lies less than 300 meters (984 feet) away, a place loaded – and reloaded since February – with ever more terrifying fantasies: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko, hordes of Muslim migrants, terrorists.
A day after our arrival, on Tuesday, Oct. 25, Polish border guards discover the body of a Black man believed to have drowned in a nearby river.
“We got the information from border guard officers who discovered the body of a dark-skinned man in the river,” Tomasz Krupa, a spokesman for the Podlasie region police, confirms the next day.
Official information provided by the police is silent on the identity of the deceased.
“It is most likely the Sudanese man we were looking for,” says Piotr Czaban, a citizen journalist who runs a YouTube channel called Czaban robi raban (Czaban raises a rabble), and an activist associated with the Podlasie Volunteer Humanitarian Service.
All the details fit a story he was told by nationals from the Northeast African nation of Sudan who accompanied the missing 23-year-old and later notified activists of his death.
A group of four men had crossed the border from Belarus in early October, they said. While crossing the Swislocz (Svislach) River, which coincides with the border at that point, one of them lost his balance.
The heavy backpack he was wearing probably dragged him under the water. The man was a poor swimmer. He never surfaced.
Of the remaining three Sudanese men, two were pushed back to Belarus. Only one of them managed to make it to Poland – he is now in the Centre for Foreigners in Przemysl.
Another corpse was fished out of the Swislocz on July 29. It was identified as a certain “Mahmoud” from Egypt.
According to official statistics, he was the 19th casualty of the humanitarian crisis along the Polish-Belarusian border, which made headlines worldwide last winter, though the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights says about 200 people have gone missing at the border. The real number of migrant deaths remains unknown.
Whatever the number, the fence built by Poland in response to the influx of migrants in 2021 has not prevented Russia from continuing to use immigration as a weapon to destabilize Europe.
Along what was until recently one of the European Union's most peaceful borders now runs a 186-kilometer (116-mile) steel, concrete, and barbed wire fence crossing the Bialowieza Forest, the last primeval forest in Europe.
Local swamps made building a wall along the entire border impossible, so other devices, such as a light projector, are set up to monitor those sections.
The number of soldiers in the region has dropped from 15,000 at the peak of the migration crisis in late 2021 to 1,600 today.
The border crisis of last winter saw tens of thousands of migrants from places like the Middle East and Africa crowd along the Polish-Belarus border in conditions of dire cold and deprivation, with Poland and other countries saying Belarus deliberately stoked the crisis as a form of “hybrid warfare.”
Some 11,000 attempted border crossings have been recorded since the beginning of this year, including 1,600 in October. There were 17,000 in October 2021.
The fence was built at a cost of €340 million ($340.6 million).
“The situation along the Polish-Belarusian border is deteriorating,” says Mateusz Luft from the Catholic Intelligentsia Club (KIK).
“It appears that the fence hasn't stopped the flow of migrants but has just upped the ante for those who want to cross the border through the forest. People suffer injuries like fractures of the limbs, wounds,” Luft adds.
Then, referring to a small Russian exclave bordering northeastern Poland, he warns that the situation will likely “be the same with the (border) fence with Kaliningrad.”
Kaliningrad, home to some half a million people, is Russian territory, in a remnant of World War II, but borders Poland and Lithuania, not the rest of Russia.
“People shouldn’t be dying in the woods,” Luft adds. “They need to be given humanitarian and medical aid irrespectively of their country of origin (or) reasons why they are in the forest. We’re not there to judge those people – women, children, pregnant, sometimes whole families – or the policy of Lukashenko or Putin. We are there to save lives.”
More fences
It’s Nov. 2, and Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak announces that Poland will start work on a temporary barbed wire fence along the border between Poland and Kaliningrad, which stretches 232 km (144 mi).
This followed news of the launch of flights from the Middle East and North Africa to Kaliningrad, he says.
The wall will consist of three rows of barbed wire at a height of 2.5 meters and a width of 3 meters (8 feet high, 10 feet wide).
The Kaliningrad.ru website reports that authorities of the local airport plan to launch connections with Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Ethiopia, bringing to mind charges that last winter Belarus lured migrants in by airplane and then sent them to the Polish border.
Blaszczak appeals to the opposition to support the initiative.
“I hope this time the opposition won’t organize trips with pizza to the border,” he says, referring to groups that tried to aid the migrants last winter.
Xenophobia
The Polish government is trying to kill two birds with one stone, playing on a deep-seated anti-Russianism prevalent among many in Poland and the antipathy towards migrants from outside Europe, i.e. those who are Muslim and/or have darker skin.
Polish anthropologist Maria Janion, who died in 2020, was a keen observer of how post-1989 Poles came to see Russia as alien to Europe and reduce it in the Polish national imagery to a defamiliarized monstrosity.
During the decades of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain set a geographical division into “us” and “them.” The border between two different systems was inscribed in the mental map: the civilized “us” and the “uncivilized” others. The Other, to use Indian American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s phrase, became “spatially incarcerated.”
After 1989, this frontier started to escape the confines of space and time, and Poland and its regional neighbors shifted onto the “respectable” side. Today, the “Wild East” is being reincarcerated at Poland’s borders with Belarus and Kaliningrad, and the war in Ukraine will decide which side of this imaginary border Kyiv belongs to.
The reason these xenophobic attitudes are coming to the fore now is not because they didn’t exist before, but because the rhetoric on Western Europe has changed over the past few years, wrote Remi Adekoya, a half-Polish, half-Nigerian journalist and scholar, in The Guardian.
The eurozone crisis combined with a spate of terrorist attacks and increased reports of problems assimilating minorities in Western Europe led many Poles to start questioning the Western model and some to even assert that the feelings they had been reluctant to publicly admit to for years were actually common-sense opinions, he says.
Of the estimated 1.2 million refugees that arrived in Europe in 2016-17, the Polish government agreed to take in just 1%.
The refugee crisis was often presented in the Polish right-wing press as an Islamic invasion of Europe. Headlines with words like “raid,” “conquest” and “penetration” were used. At the same time, Western Europe is described as a culture dominated by a leftist influence in which Christian values, tradition, and family have been forgotten.
Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) "has managed to instigate moral panic amongst some citizens, on one hand, and mobilize the indignant members of society on the other,” sociologist Ewa Stanczyk argues.
