Please don’t call it a “wall”” : “No, it’s not an airtight wall, it’s just a way to protect yourself, it’s a barrier”, insists the Lithuanian supervisor of the site, on the border with Belarus. The four-meter-high metal fence now extends over 120 kilometers. Some 600 workers are mobilized to complete its construction by the start of the school year in September, when the Ministers of the Interior of the Member States of the European Union meet on Wednesday February 2 in Tourcoing, at the invitation of France. . With, on the menu, migration issues and the reform of the Schengen area.
Last summer, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko organized an unprecedented wave of migration to Poland and Lithuania. Unheard of for the small Baltic Republic which had to manage alone the arrival of more than 4,000 asylum seekers. Since then, Vilnius has turned back most of these migrants, thus flouting the Geneva Convention. And initiates the construction of a wall. “A physical barrier”, therefore, according to the language of the Lithuanian authorities, repeated by the site supervisor.
“These are barbed wire with sharp wires, razor wire, so that irregular migrants, who come from opposite, cannot pass.”
The site supervisorat franceinfo
“It is a project of national interest and it is an honor to contribute to it, he continues. It’s even more than a project, it’s a duty.” A duty he now shares with the hundreds of Lithuanian police, soldiers and border guards, like Donatas, who leads a team of around sixty men who have never been so well equipped…“We have vehicles, portable thermal visors and night vision equipment, he describes. We now need to equip ourselves with a video surveillance system, so that we can record the images when there are border violations. Cameras are being installed, fully funded by the European Union.
Since it is far from unanimous among the 27 Member States of the European Union, there is no question, however, of participating in the construction of a “Wall”or at the very least to name it so for Arnoldas Abramavičius, the Lithuanian Deputy Interior Minister: “Don’t be naive, the geopolitical situation forces us to change our approach on how to manage borders. The European Union has to face a new reality.” What does not change, however, are the attempts to cross the border… Despite the new protection system, for three months, 45 migrants and asylum seekers have been helped or taken in by local NGOs…