From Belarus to the Netherlands: a Syrian refugee’s journey

When Akram* decided to get on a flight from Damascus to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, it wasn’t the first time he had attempted to leave Syria, a country torn apart by over a decade of war.

Late last summer, the 52-year-old sold his home in Latakia and travelled to Turkey, determined to cross the Evros region on foot. His ultimate goal was to join his sister in the Netherlands where she has settled after fleeing Syria years ago and works as a doctor. And eventually, to bring his own family with him.

“I came back [to Syria] from Turkey after I heard about Belarus, that people can reach Europe from Belarus,” Akram told TRT World from a reception centre in the Netherlands, where he has now applied for asylum after taking a treacherous journey that left him with a bitter taste of what it means to be used as a “weapon” in a deadly political standoff between the European Union and Belarus. 

For the European Union, the refugees may be pawns in a “hybrid war” that Belarus is waging against the bloc in retaliation for sanctions. But for the roughly 4,000 people – according to estimates by the Polish authorities – mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, who are stranded at the Belarus-Poland border around the Kuznica crossing, the route had become a safer alternative to the deadly Mediterranean and the EU’s southern borders.

“I decided to go to Belarus. And, you know, you have to agree with someone to [get you] a visa,” Akram says, “You pay some money under the table to someone you don't know.”

He made his way back to Syria and boarded a flight from Damascus to Minsk, leaving behind his wife and three sons in Latakia. Akram’s family restaurant there shut down during the pandemic, which dealt a final blow to Syria’s war-ravaged economy. He was betting everything on this trip, selling his home to pay for it.

“It's not completely safe, but at least… they don't take your passport, your money, they don't take your clothes,” Akram said, referring to reports of violent pushbacks at Greece’s land border with Turkey. 

According to Amnesty International, these have become the "de facto Greek border control policy in the Evros region.” Those who avoid violence in Evros may be returned to Turkey by the Greek coastguard, or risk being stranded at the EU’s borders in the Balkans for months or even years if they can’t pay smugglers.

Poland’s conservative government went a step further last month, and passed a law that effectively legalises pushbacks of people who have attempted “illegal entry” at the Polish border, allowing the authorities to send them back without examining their asylum claims – an obligation under international law. 

“[The Polish army] sends you back to the border, and the Belarusian army will send you back again,” Akram says. “Once you cross the forbidden area, which is the sensor fence at the beginning, you're not allowed to go back to Belarus. No way.”

No way forward, no way back

Poland declared a state of emergency on the border last August, and designated a three-kilometre-wide “exclusion zone” guarded by 20,000 police and border officers and off-limits to NGOs and journalists. This has made claims and images disseminated by both sides hard to verify, as well as contributed to creating a humanitarian emergency. Asylum seekers are trapped there with no food, water or medicine, and in freezing conditions. At least eight people are known to have died there. The latest was a 19-year-old Syrian boy who died trying to cross a river, witnesses have reported.

In early October, hundreds of people were seen gathering near the barbed wire fence at the Polish border in the so-called exclusion zone, including many women and children. 

In Minsk, Akram met smugglers and travel companions, and set off for the journey, on foot, to Poland.  

“We did the agreement and started trying,” he recounts.

“The first time was a disaster because there were children, women, old people. We were 19,” he said. “We didn’t know about the sensor fence, so we didn’t cross it. We were on the road for two days and ran out of water and food. We decided to go back to Minsk.”

A couple of days later, a smaller group set off again for the border, this time with what they thought was more reliable information. The group, most of whom were from Syria he says, managed to cross into Polish territory, but were detected by police at night. They were brought back to the exclusion zone, and had no choice but finding their way back to Minsk.

“Since we're not allowed to go back to Minsk, we dug under the sensor fence,” Akram said, “but we got busted again.”

This time it was the Belarusian border guards who stopped them from re-entering. Things got tense when one member of the group attempted to resist.

“He said, ‘I'm not going anywhere, I want to go to Minsk’. And one of the Belarusian army soldiers took his gun, and [pointed] it to his head.”

“We were scared,” he said, “there was no way else but going back to Poland.”

For this group, the cruel game was about to end.

“Two Belarusian soldiers took us during the daytime to a special area, by car, and they showed us how to cross the Polish fence,” Akram recounts. The car, he claims, was an army vehicle. Accounts given to NGOs and witnesses in Poland tell similar stories of alleged Belarusian border guards assisting migrants to find the best place to cross. Some recount violence and beatings.

A spokesperson for the State Border Committee of the Republic of Belarus denied the allegations as “absolutely impossible.”

“Migrants' statements concerning the assistance of Belarusian border guards in crossing the border are based on the words of smugglers who do not want to be unmasked,” the spokesperson told TRT World. “It is beneficial for smugglers to say that they are representatives of the Belarusian security agencies. This way they are trying to protect themselves.”

The spokesperson also denied the use of violence, while the Polish border police did not reply to a request for comment on their own forces’ conduct. The latest images from the border show Polish riot police using water cannons and tear gas to disperse a group of people trying to remove the barbed wire fence at the border, after hundreds made their way to the Kuznica border crossing from a camp in the exclusion zone.

The EU has accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of engineering the crisis and imposed new sanctions on Monday in response. Belarusian foreign ministry spokesman Anatoly Glaz accused Poland of "escalating" the migrant crisis.

The EU does not recognise Lukashenko’s August 2020 presidential election win, and has called them “neither free nor fair.” Tensions came to a head in June, when the EU imposed sanctions on Belarus after Lukashenko diverted a Ryanair flight to detain a journalist.

Akram’s group walked for another seven days in the thick forest before they could be picked up by another smuggler and taken to their destinations. One member of his group lost part of his foot due to gangrene, he says. 

Grateful to be safe, he has applied for asylum and his fate is in the hands of Dutch bureaucracy, unable to work legally while his claim is examined – which can be frustrating as he thinks about those he left behind.

“My family, I don't feel they are safe without me, and I'm the only one that can support them,” he says.

*name has been changed due to Akram's pending asylum claim