We will not force you to return to your countries, says Lukashenko to migrants at the border

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko told migrants stranded on Belarus’ border with Poland today that his country would help them return home if they wanted to, but would not force them to do so.

“We will help those of you who want to return to your homeland to do so,” Lukashenko said during a visit to a makeshift refugee camp. “But we will not force you. That is your right,” he added.

Mr Lukashenko, who has been accused by the European Union of deliberately provoking a humanitarian crisis on its eastern border, also told migrants he would not play their part in political games.

“If you want to go west, we will not detain you, we will not drown you, we will not beat you,” he said. “It’s up to you. Go ahead. Go.”

If the immigration crisis is not resolved now, it will become even bigger, he added.

In his first public appearance at the border since the crisis erupted, Lukashenko visited a facility that provides food to migrants and spoke to Red Cross workers at the camp, Belta news agency reported.

Mr Lukashenko criticized Belarus’s neighboring EU member states, saying “we will do everything we want, even if it is bad for the Poles and Latvians” and added: “By no means will you “We will not handcuff you and we will not load you on planes to send you home if you do not want that.”

The EU accuses Belarus of transporting thousands of people from the Middle East by air and forcing them to cross the border and enter its territory in retaliation for EU sanctions against Lukashenko for cracking down on protests against the disputed presidency last year. Belarus denies this.

Minsk has begun airlifting a number of refugees to their home countries, but has said it expects an answer from the EU on whether to accept the 2,000 migrants trapped at the border.

Hundreds of Iraqi migrants seeking to enter the EU have been flown home by two flights from Belarus today, as more and more migrants lose hope that they will be able to reach the European bloc safely.

The planes landed in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region, in the early hours of today, carrying about 600 Iraqis, mostly Kurds, according to the Kurdish government and officials at Erbil airport.

Many of the passengers said they were relieved to be back.

“I do not want to do this route again. It was bad, it rained a lot and it snowed,” said Malak Hassan, 11, whose family tried to cross the border into Belarus.

Awat Kader, from Iraqi Kurdistan, said he had seen migrants beaten during his stay near the Belarus-Lithuania border and would not try to make the trip again.

“We even had to pay a lot of money to go back to Minsk,” he said.

Source: AMPE