Belarus opposition leader warns of border migration crisis

WARSAW – Belarus' exiled absorption person Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya connected Wednesday urged the planetary assemblage to halt a “humanitarian catastrophe” which she said is being created by the Belarusian authorities facilitating largescale migration into the European Union.

Thousands of migrants from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa person been lured to Belarus connected tourer visas and encouraged to transverse into Poland, Lithuania, and to a lesser grade Latvia — each 3 EU nations that borderline Belarus.

Several precocious died of exhaustion arsenic they tried to get from Belarus to Poland crossed an country of forests and swamps.

Tsikhanouskaya warned that arsenic wintertime approaches, she fears those deaths "will turn into dozens.”

“So I impulse the United Nations and the satellite assemblage to enactment to halt the humanitarian catastrophe that’s astir to hap successful the mediate of Europe,” she told a property league during the Warsaw Security Forum.

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During her sojourn to Warsaw she besides met with Polish President Andrzej Duda and different Polish leaders, who person been supportive of the efforts of the Belarusian absorption and fixed succor to radical targeted by the authorities successful Minsk.

Tsikhanouskaya was the main absorption challenger to longtime authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko successful past year's disputed election. She present lives successful exile successful Lithuania.

Poland has taken a pugnacious attack to securing its border, saying it indispensable support its nationalist information successful the look of a “hybrid war” onslaught by Lukashenko.

“It’s revenge (against) Poland and Lithuania for their enactment of the Belarusian antiauthoritarian movement,” Tsikhanouskaya said.

She did not straight knock Poland's approach, which has progressive denying migrants the close to use for asylum and pushing immoderate families with children backmost crossed the border, successful usurpation of planetary law. But she noted that “people who are crossing the borderline are not guilty. They are victims.”

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She said that determination are inactive immoderate 10,000 to 15,000 migrants present successful Belarus hoping to marque the crossing into the EU, and that the fig was growing. She did not specify the root of the numbers she quoted.

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