RT France Crew Detained at Poland-Belarus Border
09:00 GMT 15.11.2021 (Updated: 13:12 GMT 15.11.2021)
© Sputnik / Viraly Belousov
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Tens of thousands of migrants, hailing mostly from nations in the Middle East and North Africa, wracked by war and violence, descended on Belarus and made their way northwest in a bid to get into the European Union. Belarusian authorities say they no longer have the resources to police the flow thanks to several rounds of tough European sanctions.
Polish police have detained an RT France film crew along the border with Belarus, supposedly for being present illegally in a restricted area.
"This morning, police detained a film crew consisting of two men. They said they wanted to film a report, but did not have permission to be in the area where a state of emergency has been declared," a police spokesperson in Podlaskie Voivodeship told Sputnik on Monday.
Earlier, RT France Chief Ksenia Fedorova wrote on Telegram that correspondent David Khalifa and cameraman Jordi Demory managed to go live by telephone from the village of Usnarz Gorny, a few hundred metres from the border, before being detained, saying that Polish police were behaving in an "extremely unfriendly" way toward them. "The last message that we received from our correspondent was the word 'handcuffs.' Since then the crew has not been in touch," Fedorova indicated.
Before the detention, Khalifa said authorities had asked him and his cameraman repeatedly to leave the area and not film or take pictures.
RT France has contacted the French Embassy in Warsaw over the journalists' detention. According to Fedorova, they may not have known about the 3 km emergency zone declared around the border area.
Later on Monday, police said Demory and Khalifa had been brought to a court in the town of Sokolka, northeastern Poland for a hearing. The court is expected to "decide on their case," according to a police spokesperson.
Border Crisis
Tens of thousands of migrants hailing mostly from war- and violence-torn nations in the Middle East and North Africa have descended on Belarus in recent months in an attempt to make their way into Poland and the Baltic States of Lithuania and Latvia, and further west to wealthier nations of the European Union.
The crisis was sparked by the deterioration of relations between Belarus and the EU – which slapped Minsk with multiple rounds of debilitating sanctions following last year's presidential elections, in which incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko coasted to victory, sparking mass, Western-backed anti-government protests.
Tensions on the border began building up in July, as small numbers of migrants began using Belarus to travel west into the EU. The crisis was exacerbated last week, after several thousand migrants arrived at the border with Poland and set up camp, with some attempting to force their way into Poland.
Warsaw and its allies have blamed Belarus and Russia for the situation, calling it a form of "hybrid warfare" by Minsk and Moscow. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has suggested that the West's own policies -specifically decades of military interventions resulting in the destabilisation of the Middle East and North Africa, were to blame. "They not only stirred up and shattered the Middle East, they destroyed these nations' statehood," Lukashenko said in an interview with Russian media last week. The Belarusian president added that several rounds of tough EU sanctions against his country have drained security forces' ability to control migrant flow.
For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed any attempts to somehow blame Moscow for the border crisis, saying on Sunday that he only found out about the situation through the media.
Poland has been repeatedly criticised by European officials for preventing media, medics, and volunteer organisations from going to the border to assist migrants, and has also faced criticism for border patrol troops' brutality toward asylum seekers. Belarusian border guards have repeatedly reported cases of beatings and of migrants being pushed back by force. At least 11 migrants have died while attempting to cross the frontier between Belarus and the EU nations.
Most of the migrants are believed to hail from the countries of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, and Yemen – all countries which Western powers have either bombed, occupied, or helped to destabilise over the past two decades.
