There are migrants who reach their goal and others who never do. But some suffer a special martyrdom, even in these days: they are used as “weapons” in a crisis between countries.
The most recent and notorious case of this practice is, according to some, what happened in recent weeks on the border between the European Union and Belarus, where thousands of migrants were stranded.
These people – mostly from from the Middle East, but also from more distant countries like Cuba— have suffered inhumane conditions in increasingly icy forests, and at least 12 died trying to enter the EU.
Western authorities believe that the Belarusian government has sent migrants to the border in response to international sanctions it received for human rights abuses.
“We strongly condemn the use by the (Alexander) Lukashenko regime of innocent migrants as a political weapon, such as a ffu erzo of destabilization, ”said US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday.
Lukashenko, who in 2018 obtained a reelection denounced as fraudulent, rejected those accusations, but told the BBC that it is “very possible” that the military of their country has helped the migrants to cross the border with Poland. part of governments and other actors, including in Latin America.
From 1951 there was at least 76 cases of this type , says Kelly Greenhill, a political scientist who published her book “Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy” a decade ago.
“The phenomenon has continued, certainly ”, Greenhill, today visiting professor at SOAS University in London, tells BBC Mundo.
And he warns that Those who resort to these controversial and unconventional methods seem to get away with most of the time.
From Cuba to Bangladesh
Greenhill’s count focuses on the last seven decades, because it was in 1938 when international rules were codified to protect those fleeing violence and persecution.
This increased the political consideration of migrants and refugees, but also could make them a more tempting instrument for some leaders .
There are different ways of seeing it relevan The historical history of the cases, explains the author.
One may be the geopolitical impact: there were “coercive episodes” with migrants or refugees that contributed to the emergence of new States, such as Bangladesh in 1971 and Kosovo in 1999 .
But he adds that the relevance of cases can also be measured by their impact on domestic politics, or by their political-cultural validity decades after they occurred.
In his opinion, an example of this is the exodus from Mariel from Cuba to the US in 1980.
After more than 10. 000 People broke into the Peruvian embassy in Havana asking for asylum, the then Cuban president, Fidel Castro, suddenly opened the p uerto Mariel so that whoever wants to leave the island.
The result was a massive exodus to the US of 125. 000 Cubans , including many prisoners for common crimes deliberately sent in the middle of the Cold War.
The migratory wave lasted seven months, took Washington by surprise and left an indelible mark, especially in Miami.
It also had a political cost for the then US president ., Jimmy Carter, who lost reelection that year, and for the then governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who was also defeated at the polls after hosting many newly arrived Cubans in his state.
Greenhill sign In those years, other countries in the region, such as Honduras and Haiti, obtained concessions from the United States in exchange for allowing refugees into their territories or controlling their emigration, respectively.
“This type of coercion has been used in the Americas, and around the world, for a long, long time,” explains the expert who is also an associate professor at the University of Tufts and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
And he maintains that, in the cases that he has been able to verify globally, those who challenge others by involving migrants or refugees seem to be more successful than failures in claims ranging from financial aid to military actions .
“It still seems that plaintiffs tend to obtain at least some what they looked for in near to 75% of cases and more or less everything they searched for near the 57% of cases identified ”, he points out .
“Open to bribery”
Other experts indicate that this type of practice dates back to before World War II, for example with the use that Hitler made of Jewish refugees.
On 1938, the Nazi regime cornered Polish Jews in Germany and tried to deport them to Poland, whose government refused to accept them, recalls Tara Zahra, a history professor at the University of Chicago.
“The refugees, like those in Belarus today, were trapped in a ‘no man’s land’ between the two states,” Zahra tells BBC Mundo.
And he observes that “the use of immigrants as or weapons is not, unfortunately, something new. ”
But the number of international migrants has changed a lot in recent times: tripled in 50 years , up to 281 million in 2020 according to United Nations figures.
This made some more sensitive to the movement of migrants , and others more likely to profit from the phenomenon.
Leo Lucassen, an expert in migration history, believes that The EU became especially vulnerable to demands from third parties , having agreed to help countries in the Middle East and Africa to manage their borders to prevent migrants from reaching Europe.
“By doing that, I gave them ace a weapon. Turkey has already used that weapon to some extent by threatening to open its borders in 2017 or 2020 and let Syrians go to Greece if the EU did not pay more ”, says Lucassen, director of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, to BBC Mundo.
Nothing indicates Until now, with the recent crisis Belarus has won the pulse of the EU, which on Thursday imposed new sanctions on that country with the US and other allies.
But in Lucassen’s opinion, leaders like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Russian Vladimir Putin could now look closely at what Lukashenko did in Belarus.
“It is very clear that for the EU this immediately creates a crisis situation, as they call it themselves. And that, of course, makes it very open to bribery and blackmail ”, he concludes.
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