Lukashenko knows that border anxiety is the most toxic tool of the tyrant
(Alamy)
Europe is once again in the grip of border anxiety. Migrants are on the move and walls are being built all along the eastern frontiers of the EU. Just now the flashpoint is Poland’s border with Belarus (pictured above), where thousands of asylum-seekers have congregated in the hope of walking through the woods and somehow making their way to Germany. That hope is vain: with 12,500 troops of the Polish army standing guard, these migrants are more likely to perish in subzero temperatures than to reach their destination. If caught, they will be unceremoniously returned to Belarus. But they keep trying.
How have they got there in the first place? This is a brutal business, highly profitable for those who traffick migrants and for the airlines that fly them to Minsk from all over the Muslim world. Belarus is a pariah, even a rogue state. It is run by a dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, who has not only crushed all resistance to his rule within his benighted country but forces civilian aircraft who overfly it to land so that he can arrest opposition critics on board. Lukashenko has responded to EU sanctions by weaponising this criminal trade in desperate people. Not only is he enabling migrants to mass along his borders, but when Polish guards intervene, his troops threaten to shoot them. The tyrant is counting on the idea that if he can put enough pressure on the richer countries to the West, not only will they lift sanctions but also bribe him to stop the migrants coming. Having looted his own impoverished country, Lukashenko is trying to engineer a shakedown of the EU.
His inspiration is, of course, the devil’s pact that the EU made a few years ago with another notorious despot: Tayyip Recep Erdogan. The Turkish President has repeatedly threatened to reopen his borders with Greece and the Balkans unless the EU keeps the subsidies flowing and turns a blind eye to his atrocities and repression. Turkey has received more than £5 billion from Brussels so far to keep up to three million Syrians in refugee camps: a tempting sum in hard currency for the ramshackle regime in Minsk. But Erdogan has far more bargaining power than Lukashenko: in particular, the Turkish minorities across Western Europe, especially Germany, can be mobilised in his support. Politicians across the EU, such as Angela Merkel, have learned the hard way that, however liberal their voters may appear in opinion polls, they still expect their governments to control immigration. Hence Europe, with its porous periphery and democratic politics, is uniquely vulnerable to blackmail by unscrupulous autocrats.
The most powerful Eurasian potentate of all is, of course, Vladimir Putin. This week the German Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, accused the Russian President of “orchestrating” the burgeoning migration crisis in Eastern Europe for “political purposes”. His accusations echo those of Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish Prime Minister, who accuses Putin of using his proxy, Belarus, to carry out his plan of “rebuilding the Russian Empire”. Readers of TheArticle won’t need to be reminded that until 1918 the Russian Empire included most of present-day Poland, not to mention the Baltic states, Ukraine and, of course, Belarus. And imperial Russia’s reincarnation as the Soviet bloc extended as far west as Berlin, Prague and Budapest.
The veteran Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, has responded robustly to the protests from Warsaw, drily observing that Poland is now paying the price for its participation in the Second Iraq War. Ever the helpful neighbour, Lavrov suggests that the EU should pay the Belarusians to keep migrants out, as it has done with Turkey. The implication is that otherwise Moscow cannot be held responsible for the consequences. Neither Seehofer nor Morawiecki has so far produced hard evidence that Putin is indeed masterminding the crisis, but both are conservative politicians who may have their own reasons of domestic politics to play the Russian card.
In fact, Lukashenko is quite capable of manipulating border anxiety without any prompting from Moscow. The danger here is that he could provoke a military clash on his borders, either with Poland or with Lithuania, which has given asylum to several Belarusian opposition leaders. Such a scenario could involve Nato, with which the Kremlin recently broke off all relations. The United States has quietly been reinforcing its European bases, which now include Poland, and in the medium term plans to station its latest hypersonic missiles in Germany. The Russians, who are rearming as fast as their anaemic economy can afford, never tire of accusing the West of seeking Nato membership for Ukraine, thereby encroaching still further on what they see as their sphere of influence. Border anxiety, raised to fever pitch by a bogus migration crisis, is capable of generating just the kind of incident that could lead to a direct and extremely dangerous confrontation between Russia and the West.
How we manage border anxiety has been a regular theme in TheArticle, especially in these columns. Here in Britain we have actually done a little better than our continental neighbours at containing the political fallout from poorly policed borders: there is no significant far-Right party in the UK, for example. But the natural advantages of an island have now, it seems, been exploited by the people traffickers, who land illegal migrants along England’s southern coastline almost daily. So far this year, at least 20,000 have crossed the Channel, dwarfing the 6,000 who have arrived in Germany via Belarus. While Priti Patel’s immigration Bill is still being scrutinised in Parliament, public concern is growing. Britain is certainly not immune from border anxiety, as the result of the EU referendum demonstrated, but Brexit has not by itself solved the problem. “Take back control” is just a slogan. It is much harder to give effect to such control in a manner compatible with modern human rights law and the long-standing British tradition of offering generous hospitality to genuine refugees.
Since the end of the Cold War, our islands have been mercifully free of the sense of constant threat that anyone of 60 or over can vividly remember. Few younger people have much experience or knowledge of dictatorships. That is why the more naive among us can accuse Boris Johnson of being a “tin-pot dictator” — as one young Labour shadow minister, the Slough MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, did yesterday, until the Speaker rebuked him for unparliamentary language. Anyone who wants to find out what a real dictator is like only has to take a look at the lethal game that Lukashenko is playing along his borders. In a region beset by a history of horrors, border anxiety is the most toxic tool of the tyrant.
