Illegal Immigrants Flood Belarus

04.03.2003 / 14:02 / English

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By Vyacheslav BUDKEVICH, BelaPAN for Institute for War and Peace Reporting

Ever-growing numbers of would-be migrants may have serious implications for the future expansion of the European Union.

An army of illegal immigrants is flooding west across Belarus — and the authorities appear to lack the resources and political will needed to stop them.

The internal affairs ministry estimates that as many as 200,000 economic migrants pass through the former Soviet republic every year — only a fraction are picked up and detained by the police.

Officers raided an apartment in Minsk last week and arrested 12 Afghan nationals only a few days after 60 Chinese immigrants were picked up in the capital. And in the western border town of Brest, two Cuban men were seized with fake Spanish passports they apparently bought in Russia.

The number of desperate people seeking a new life in the West is growing all the time, and Belarus has become a main transit point on their route to Scandinavia and EU countries.

The problem is expected to worsen in 2004, when the accession of several neighbouring countries to the EU means that the western Belarus will directly border the union.

"[As a result] the EU's frontier system will encounter new problems, such as illegal immigration, and crime connected with this," Jan Marius Viersma, head of a Brussels delegation for issues on cooperation with Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova, said in Minsk last November.

Viersma stressed that the problem could be solved "only with the help of our new neighbours, such as Belarus", and fresh approaches were needed.

This concern deepened after President Alexander Lukashenko threatened to open Belarus' western borders and flood the EU with economic migrants after he was refused a visa to attend November 2002's NATO summit in Prague.

The West wants Belarus to continue spending its resources protecting its borders without offering any compensation, said Lukashenko during an autumn 2002 meeting of the state committee of frontier forces, adding that from this year the authorities should only detain and deport illegal immigrants if the cost of doing so was reimbursed by Western countries or an international body.

The bulk of western aid for border protection goes to Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, with Belarus forced to bear the brunt of illegal immigration on its own, analysts say.

Colonel-General Alexander Pavlovsky, commander of the Belarus frontier forces, has complained his guards on the Polish border use equipment that doesn't work properly because there's no money to replace it.

However, the international community has not turned its back on Belarus completely. The European Commission's TACIS programme — designed to aid transitional countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe — provided more than 3.4 million euro for the demarcation of the Baltic States frontier.

European cash was also used to buy and equip three mobile frontier posts — which are already being used on the Ukrainian border — and to modernise checkpoints. Minsk also participates in international programmes for updating border-crossing procedures, combating illegal trafficking of women, and improving management of migrant flows.

Despite the political and financial problems preventing law enforcers from doing their job properly, police arrested over 2,000 illegal immigrants, with a similar number being detained by frontier guards, in 2002, forcing organised crime gangs to change their tactics.

In the mid Nineties, it was common for groups of as many as 40 illegal migrants to cross a border together. Today, they do so in much smaller groups to avoid detection.

Catching illegal immigrants in the act is only part of the solution. The second and no less difficult task is to send them back home. Here, Belarus faces numerous problems, the most serious of which is, again, lack of money.

The internal affairs ministry said that the detection, arrest and deportation of each illegal immigrant costs the state an average of 500 US dollars. Last year alone, police spent over a quarter of a million dollars in this way.

Belarus also lacks a centre for the temporary accommodation of foreign citizens and stateless persons assigned for deportation, and as a result, illegal immigrants are simply held in already-overcrowded jails.

Without greater political will and foreign assistance — unlikely to be forthcoming from an international community concerned by Belarusian human rights abuses — the illegal immigration issue is likely to rumble on for some time and may have serious implications for the further enlargement of the EU.

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