On August 2021, the eastern corridor leading to the European Union via Belarus has been opened on a large scale. Since then, tens of thousands of people have been trying to reach Poland and the EU. Trapped between Belarusian and Polish soldiers and border guards, they experience violence from both sides – intimidation, beatings, rape, theft.
The Belarusian services force them to cross the border, the Polish services subject them to illegal pushback, turning them over to the other side. Left on their own, in the border forests, they are forced into constant hiding and struggle for life. Cold, wet and beaten, they sometimes spend several days there. The Polish state does not offer them any protection; the EU’s solution is violence against the defenceless. The only support they can count on is that of grassroots groups which, despite the criminalisation of all aid activities, have been active for several months in Podlasie (a region in Poland on the border with Belarus).
From the very beginning of the opening of the eastern corridor in August 2021:
In order to carry out these activities effectively, we need funds for, among other things:
In this unequal struggle we have the army, police and border guards against us. It’s a large repressive apparatus that implements policies of segregation and supports the capitalist mechanisms of exploitation of the countries of the Global South. It’s a system that wants to break solidarity and stifle the human response in us. It feeds us with a xenophobic ideology, dehumanising people from other places on Earth while at the same time it appeals to our selfishness, frightening the society with an economic catastrophe for which capitalism is in fact responsible.
Only together can we oppose it.
No borders!
No one is illegal!
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