STRASBOURG, France - A Polish politician and former foreign minister told Rudaw that there could be as many as 70,000 migrants in Belarus wishing to enter Poland, not 7,000 as previously claimed by Minsk, as he stressed that the authorities will continue to prevent migrants from entering his country.
“We want to stop them [migrants] at the Belarusian border. This is successful right now, because most have been unable to illegally cross the border, and we have [had] to force Belarusia’s [leader Alexander] Lukashenko to send them away,” Witold Waszczykowski, who was Poland’s minister of foreign affairs until 2018 and is currently a member of the European Parliament, told Rudaw in an interview aired on Friday.
“[They] are not only 7,000 [migrants], they are probably 70,000 because they were coming by planes this summer,” he added.
Minsk had claimed that a total of 7,000 migrants were in the country, with some 2,000 of them remaining in a logistic center on its border with Poland.
The politician, who is from Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, claimed that Minsk has “misled” these people by giving them fake promises of better lives in Europe. “We are not going to make a deal with someone who is not the legitimate ruler of the country.”
European countries as well as Iraq and the Kurdistan Region have blamed Belarus for exploiting the migrants in a political battle of the wills with the European Union.
“A number of European countries and institutions support us right now… This is political support. But in the next budget of the European Union we will get millions of euros to build a fence [at] the border [to prevent] illegal migration,” Waszczykowski said.
Thousands of migrants, mostly from the Kurdistan Region, have been stuck on the Belarus-Poland border in recent months, with hundreds of them returning via planes arranged by Erbil and Baghdad. The return process continues with another group of migrants expected to return in the early hours of Saturday.
