Why Belarus closed their refugee camps
I'm guessing it has to do with Ukrainian evacuation corridors
On March 26th, a contact in Belarus suggested I look at the closures of the camps on the Poland/Belarus border, where refugees from the migrant crisis last fall are being housed.
A very simple timeline of the past few weeks, on Patreon, looks like this:
3/14 - people in Belarusian refugee camps report to U.K Guardian they are being pushed into either Poland or Ukraine
3/17 - Investigative Committee of Belarus announces death of Emil Czeczko, found hanged in his apartment in Minsk; Czeczko was a Polish soldier who defected and asked for asylum; "Czeczko had been shown on Belarusian state television several times since then, criticizing the Polish government and saying that Polish border guards had shot dead hundreds of migrants, a claim that has never been proven or confirmed either by Polish officials or international experts." (per RFE/RL 3/17/2022)
3/19 (on or about) - people start leaving camps near Polish border according to Belarusian source
3/22 - Polish border guard Twitter announces significant increase in migrant flows over Belarusian border; Belarus confirms camp closures
3/23 - Belarusian Border Committee on Facebook announces visa-free entry for Ukrainian refugees
What is odd about this is, why is there any movement at all on Belarus’ border?
Belarus is geographically key for the Ukraine war, served as the launch point for missiles targeting Ukraine, and has served as a “staging ground” for Russian forces in Ukraine.
It is hard, however, to get a solid read on whether or not Belarus is going to join the war, at least from ‘mainstream’ verified sources.
On March 4th, Belarusian head of state Alyaksandr Lukashenka announced that Belarus would not participate in the Ukraine war.
On March 16th, the Atlantic Council reported that rank-and-file Belarusian soldiers were unwilling to join the Ukraine war.
But on March 22nd, U.S. defense officials suggested to CNN that Belarus could be joining the war soon.
At time of writing, on March 29th, Belarus has yet to commit armed forces to the war.
It is difficult to explain Belarus’ border activity in the context of the position of its military.
Geopolitically, it makes even less sense. Why would they choose now to close the camps? If we believe the people who talked to the Guardian on the 14th of March, then Belarus is still treating the migrants like hybrid war assets; in which case, it stands to reason Belarus should be keeping their refugees in-place, or at the least pushing them into Poland or Ukraine, like they’re reported doing. Closing the camps wouldn’t make sense.
Belarus’ actions with regard to its camps starts to make sense when you factor in the humanitarian corridors that Russia has been proposing.
Specifically, the corridors that Russia proposed and Ukraine rejected on March 7th led to Belarus, according to The Guardian, NBC News, and the Times of Israel.
Unbelievably, it seems as if Russia expected that people would want to flee to Belarus, which, if you know anything about recent events in Belarus, is basically the expectation that people would want to flee a warzone into an authoritarian steady-state that Facebook-stalks its own people and puts them in jail for thought-crimes.
Probably not realistic.
If we read the rest of the timeline in the frame of, Belarus liquidating its migrant camps after the humanitarian corridors play fails, it starts to make sense.
Seven days later, Belarusian State Border Committee people start pushing people out of the camps.
Ten days later, Czeczko dies, which, to be fair, may not be part of this pattern of liquidation (because apparently people hang themselves in their apartments all the time in this part of the world).
Twelve days later, people start leaving the camps en masse.
Two weeks later, Belarus finally officially announces the camp closures, and shortly thereafter, half-heartedly makes an attempt to get more refugees from Ukraine in there.
We can fit the reports of mass abductions from NBC News, UKRInform and Yahoo! News into this frame as well: it makes some degree of sense that mass forced deportations would become the fallback tactic for depopulating Ukraine and absorbing its people into Russia, if humanitarian aid corridors failed.
And the Belarusian Border Committee is, incidentally, yet another sanctioned entity, on Facebook, because apparently if you throw a rock in the air on Facebook it lands on a sanctioned entity.