By Nada Nader Youssef Youssef
BERLIN (Reuters) – Kurdish-Iraqi migrant Elias Baraa says he was close to starvation when he paid a Belarusian soldier $100 for a tin of beef after being trapped almost two weeks between Belarusian and Polish forces on the European Union’s eastern frontier.
“I spent 12 days on the border with Poland, we were told (by Belarusian guards) to find rats to eat,” Baraa, 23, told Reuters via Facebook from Minsk.
Baraa is one of thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa who say they travelled to Belarus in the hope of crossing into the European Union, only to find themselves stranded in makeshift forest camps without adequate food or water as bitter winter conditions set in.
“I was starving and crying like a little kid, then I found Belarusian soldiers were selling food to migrants and I bought this beef can for $100,” said Baraa, who has since managed to reach Germany, his desired destination.
Reuters has spoken to dozens of migrants with similar stories of having to pay large sums to Belarusian security personnel for food or to leave the border area.
The European Union accuses Minsk of engineering the migrant crisis as revenge for Western sanctions imposed for human rights abuses. Belarus denies the charge.
Reuters was not able to independently verify statements made by Baraa and other individual migrants for this report.
An officer of the Belarus State Border Committee told Reuters the suggestion that guards had demanded large sums of money from migrants were “ridiculous” and “of course not true”.
RETURN TO MINSK
When Haydar Rima, a Syrian migrant in his thirties, found himself in the forest with no food and no way to charge his phone, he decided to return to Minsk from the border.
Rima, who had been living and working as an accountant in Egypt before flying to the Belarusian capital in late October, said this was the “hardest part” of his journey.
“I tried 13 times to get out without paying money. The military did not allow us to return, so I paid them 1,000 euros to leave the forest,” said Rima, who has since returned to Egypt.
Mostafa Ahmed, a 21-year-old taxi driver from the southern Iraqi city of Basrah, said he had dreamed since childhood of going abroad in search of a better life.
Ahmed was one of a group of 14 people who paid a driver $200 each to take them back to Minsk from the border.
“I am pretty sure that this driver… paid the military because another group of four migrants ordered a car on a mobile application and the military didn’t allow the driver to enter (the border area),” he said.
Alena Chekhovich, from rights group Human Constanta, said many migrants found themselves in tough situations away from the border and it could be hard for non-governmental organisations like hers to reach them in cities.
Often they find themselves in cities like Minsk without money to support themselves and without the aid offered on the border by organisations such as the Red Cross.
“The situation is complicated with people who are stuck in cities, but Human Constanta in cooperation with other NGOs collect warm clothes, food and medicine and give them to migrants in Minsk,” she said.
Other organisations try to lend a hand too, such as the Red Cross Belarus or the International Organization for Migration (IOM) office in Belarus, which told Reuters it provided aid to migrants at a facility in Bruzgi on the border.
The IOM also assists migrants who are willing to voluntarily return to their country of origin.
Belarus has begun to fly some migrants home but says it is also waiting for an answer from the EU to its demand that Germany accept 2,000 people stranded at the border. The EU and Germany have rejected the request.
For Ahmed, however, still holed up in Minsk, returning to Iraq is not an option, after his family there sold their last gold jewellery to send him money to try again to enter Poland.
“It would be better to die on the border than be in Iraq,” he said.
(Reporting by Nada Nader Youssef, additional reporting by Gabrielle Tetrault-Farber and Vladimir Soldatkin, writing by Alan Charlish; Editing by Gareth Jones)
