Poland calls for state of emergency on the border with Belarus amid rising migrants

WARSAW, Aug 31 (Reuters) – The Polish government on Tuesday called on the president to declare a state of emergency in two regions on the border with Belarus after the Polish Border Guard said hundreds of illegal steps had taken place. legal this month.

Poland began building a barbed wire fence last week along the border in an effort to curb the flow of migrants from countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan from Belarus.

A state of emergency would give the authorities broader powers to control and control the movements of people.

It is likely that President Andrzej Duda, a close ally of the Nationalist Party of Law and Justice (PiS), will approve the state of emergency, which would last 30 days and cover parts of the Podlaskie and Lubelskie regions.

“The situation on the border with Belarus is a crisis and it is still tense,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told a news conference while announcing the measure.

Relations between the European Union and Belarus have deteriorated sharply over the past year since President Alexander Lukashenko won an election that his opponents and Western countries said were manipulated.

The EU has imposed economic sanctions on Belarus and accused Lukashenko of deliberately encouraging illegal immigrants to move to Poland and the Baltic states Latvia and Lithuania in the form of a “hybrid war”.

“The Lukashenko regime decided to push these people into Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian territory in an effort to destabilize them,” Morawiecki said.

Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski said the planned state of emergency would apply mainly to or near border areas.

Poland also sees Belarus ’behavior as retaliation for Warsaw’s decision to take refuge Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, a Belarusian athlete who refused to return home from the Tokyo Olympics. Minsk has not responded to requests for comment.

Polish authorities have been criticized by human rights groups for not accepting migrants and for denying adequate medical care at the border. Warsaw says they are the responsibility of the Belarusian authorities.

Report by Alan Charlish, Pawel Florkiewicz, Alicja Ptak and Joanna Plucinska Edited by Gareth Jones

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