In the latest salvo in the war of words, European Union Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, accused Belarus of engaging in “an act of state-sponsored migrant smuggling” and said sanctions and stopping flights to Minsk that carry migrants were “our most effective tools in this struggle.”įoreign ministers of the G-7 group of leading industrialized countries also condemned “the Belarus regime’s orchestration of irregular migration across its borders” in a statement Thursday.Įismont said that the fact that hundreds of people were leaving Belarus shows that the government is holding up its part of the bargain.
That left no one at the border camps, state-run agency Belta reported Thursday.īut in all, Eismont, Lukashenko’s spokeswoman, said as many as 7,000 migrants in total remain in the country. Other people have moved to a nearby warehouse, which Belarusian authorities set up on Tuesday, offering mattresses, water, hot meals and medical assistance. The flight plans to make two stops - one in the city of Irbil and another in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. And 374 boarded one that left Thursday afternoon, Lukashenko’s spokeswoman Natalya Eismont said. Belarus denies orchestrating the crisis, which has seen migrants entering the country since summer and then trying to cross into Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.Īmid the tug-of-war, a total of 430 Iraqis have registered for flights home, according to Iraq’s consul in Russia, Majid Al-Kilani. The West has accused Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko of luring the migrants to the border to use them as pawns to destabilize the 27-nation bloc in retaliation for its sanctions on his authoritarian regime. But Poland didn’t want to let them in, and Belarus didn’t want them returning to the capital of Minsk or otherwise settling in the country. Most are fleeing conflict or hopelessness at home and aim to reach Germany or other western European countries. At least 12 people have died in the area in recent weeks, including a 1-year-old whose death a Polish humanitarian organization reported Thursday. 8, some 2,000 people, mostly from the Middle East, have been stranded at the border crossing, trapped in a dank forest as forces from the two countries faced off against each other. Meanwhile, state-run Belarusian media reported that there were no more migrants left in the makeshift camps near the Polish frontier after authorities opened a heated warehouse for them to shelter from the cold in.
MOSCOW: Hundreds of Iraqis flew home from Belarus on Thursday, abandoning their hopes of reaching the European Union following more than a week of tensions at the bloc’s eastern border, where thousands of migrants became stuck.