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Yemeni refugees on the Belarusian-Polish border ‘graveyard’ [1]
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Date: 2023-02
Travelling between Poland and Belarus was relatively easy back in the 1990s, and the illicit cross-border trade was a crucial source of income for many locals. “I used to go back and forth almost daily… bringing back alcohol and cigarettes,” said one woman from the Muslim Tatar community in the Polish village of Bohoniki. Today, her community helps to bury those who have died attempting to cross the border without authorisation.
Polish border guards reported that there were more than 15,000 attempted border-crossings from Belarus last year, and more than 40,000 in 2021. At least 34 deaths have been documented along the Polish-Belarusian border since August 2021, though the real death toll is likely to be much higher and may never be known, with some bodies likely scavenged by animals before being discovered.
Among those attempting to make the crossing are Yemenis, fleeing what the UN has described as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”.
Since 2019, I have been working on a research project that follows Yemenis’ transnational migratory journeys. In our conversations, Yemeni refugees who have made it to Germany via Belarus and Poland have described the forests of eastern Europe as a graveyard. “You see dead people, you see people dying, there are people in all kinds of terrible states there,” one told me.
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But the prospect of death is not a deterrent for those who have been living in the shadow of violence and disaster. “We’re already dead anyway” is a common refrain I hear.
Yemen has been ravaged for the past eight years by the Saudi-led war. Lives and livelihoods have been destroyed; the economy and infrastructure have been shattered; epidemics of cholera, hunger and coronavirus have swept through the country,
In areas governed by the Houthis, public sector employers work without salaries, people are disappeared, and children are drawn into militias. There is also a disastrous water crisis that may soon render parts of the country inhabitable, while ongoing gas, electricity and fuel crises make everyday life, irrespectively of occasional ceasefires, a challenge.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/yemen-refugees-belarus-poland-border-eu-death-solidarity/
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