(Moscow) Belarus said on Friday that all of the some 2,000 migrants evacuated in recent days from a makeshift camp near the Polish border have spent the first night in a warm night in a reception center on its territory.
More than a thousand of them had already spent the previous night in this hangar, and on Thursday evening the hundreds of migrants still camping under the stars or in tents in freezing temperatures were transferred to the same building located nearby. from the border.
This transfer, after a week of face-to-face encounters with the Polish forces which prevents them from crossing, reduces tensions and fears for the health of these people as winter approaches.
“They will receive around eight tonnes of food,” Belta state agency said on its Telegram account, posting photos of migrants sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor of a hangar.
Thousands of people, mostly from the Middle East, have tried in recent weeks to enter the European Union via Belarus, which has been accused of knowingly organizing the influx in revenge for Western sanctions.
Minsk said Thursday that 7,000 migrants were in its territory, saying it was ready to “repatriate” 5,000 of them.
Belarus also assured that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met with President Alexander Lukashenko on Wednesday, would negotiate a “humanitarian corridor” with the EU to evacuate the remaining 2,000 migrants to Germany.
But this announcement was firmly denied by the German government, while Minsk, isolated on the international scene, seeks to negotiate directly with the West.
The evacuation of these migrants comes after a week of growing tensions between Belarus and the European Union, the latter fearing a repeat of a migration crisis similar to that of 2015.
Thursday evening, 431 migrants trapped in Belarus were repatriated to Iraq, most of them to Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, the others to Baghdad.
Since the start of the crisis in the summer at least 11 migrants have died on both sides of the Belarusian-Polish border, according to humanitarian organizations.
A sign of the human tragedies unfolding in this cold and humid forest, a Polish NGO said Thursday that it intervened there with a Syrian couple who said they had lost their one-year-old son.