(Paris) France on Wednesday accused the family of Belarusian President Alexander Loukachenko of being behind a “smuggling” of “cleverly organized” human beings to the European Union, via Turkey and Dubai.
This “trafficking in human beings is organized, by the Lukashenko family itself directly, with third countries, in any case with commercial flights and organized tours”, declared the Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune. .
“The regime is cleverly organized by Turkey, by Dubai”, he added before the Senate European Affairs Committee, recalling that migrants had also been transported “from Iraq”.
Europeans suspect President Lukashenko of bringing migrants by plane from the Middle East and Africa to Minsk, before returning them to Lithuania, Latvia and Poland, in retaliation for economic sanctions imposed by the European Union on his diet.
“It is an unbearable traffic which aims to weaken and divide the European Union”, insisted Clément Beaune.
“The trap into which Lukashenko wants us to fall, we have lived it with Turkey, is to tell us’ it is you who do not want migrants, it is you who mistreat them, it is you which does not respect the main principles which you claim ”, launched Mr. Beaune.
“We must be impeccable, firm and human in this response,” continued the Secretary of State in a criticism aimed in particular at Poland.
Warsaw is considering building a wall and has imposed a state of emergency in the area from which Polish law enforcement forces push migrants back to Belarus.
Lithuania, for its part, has launched the construction of a barbed wire fence along its border with Belarus.
Twelve European countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and the Czech Republic, Slovakia) wrote on October 7 to the Commission asking the EU to finance these constructions.
“It is not with razor-sharp barbed wire that we will solve the problem” nor “with pushbacks or an emergency law that does not allow the press to access a large area simply to verify what’s going on there, ”said Clément Beaune.
The French official pleaded for “European action vis-à-vis air links, airports, countries or companies which allow arrival in Belarus and then transport to European borders”.