How Dictators Use Refugees (Part 2)

Erdogan, Lukashenko and Putin have re-introduced the instrumentalisation of refugees, an ancient military tactic, in our time. The effects on our open societies are disturbing.

This article was first published by Liberties Journal. It is reproduced here in two parts.

Refugees at Malakasa camp, 30km north of Athens, walk to pick up lunch.

2021

Shortly after an election in August 2020 returned Alexander Lukashenko to a sixth term as president of Belarus, riots erupted in the streets of Minsk. Lukashenko’s margin of eighty percent of the popular vote was not credible to many who had voted for his opponent, the 38 year-old school teacher Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who claimed that she had won sixty percent of the vote. (She was running in place of her husband, whom Lukashenko had jailed.)

Lukashenko’s ensuing crackdown prompted EU travel bans and asset freezes on dozens of businesspeople and individuals in the state apparatus that was responsible for the repression, and eventually included banning Belarusian carriers from EU airspace. On May 26 2021, Belarus’ president Alexander Lukashenko retaliated, threatening to flood his neighbours with “refugees and drugs”. Another dictator had found his own political use for refugees. Refugees crossing into Lithuania from Belarus, most of them Iraqis, were reported to number 4,100 by September, fifty-five times the previous year’s flows.

In the autumn Lithuania began building a five-hundred-kilometre-long fence along its border with Belarus. By then refugees were walking over Belarus’ borders with Latvia and Poland as well. The European Union condemned Lukashenko’s policy as an attempt to destabilise its neighbours and press the bloc to lift sanctions. Belarus said sanctions were depriving it of the ability to control its borders. “The instrumentalisation of migrants for political purposes by Belarus is unacceptable,” Ursula von Der Leyen said on November 8. “Instrumentalisation” was a phrase first used in the context of Turkey’s 2020 operation against Greece, and the reference was not coincidental. Unlike Turkey, Belarus does not border on refugee-producing states, but its state airline, Belavia, was offering visa-free travel to refugees from Istanbul, as were Turkish Airlines, and those flights were enabling it to stage a refugee crisis in Central Europe.