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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. Now, to the latest on the migrant crisis continuing to unfold in Belarus near that country's border with Poland. Now, if this is a story that you haven't gotten your mind around folks, because it's happening far away, to people without many ties to you, or New York, or the US, this is worth getting to know about, if for no other reason, because one of my next guests thinks it has huge implications for democracy, both in Europe and everywhere else, because it's emboldening authoritarian governments and handing them some tools for blackmail.

Here are some of the basics. Thousands of people leaving countries in the Middle East, including Syria, Iraq and Yemen were sheltered in a warehouse, in Belarus last week. Migrants spent days in camp near a border crossing between Belarus and Poland. They lacked adequate food, supplies, and warm clothing for the freezing temperatures. Many saw Belarus as a path into the EU through bordering countries like Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

Authorities in Belarus eased visa rules while security forces suggested ways of crossing into EU countries, going as far as to supply wire cutters to penetrate border fences, but here's what happened. These migrants arriving at the fortified border with Poland were met with water cannons, and tear gas, as border guards kept them out. Get this, the Polish minister of Defense tweet, "Thank you to the soldiers for stopping the assault." He called it the assault.

Here now to share the latest, and explain some political and historical context, are Monika Pronczuk, New York Times reporter in Brussels covering the European Union and Charlotte McDonald-Gibson journalist and author of Cast Away: True Stories of Survival from Europe's Refugee Crisis. Monika and Charlotte, welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for coming on with us today.

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson: Thanks, Brian. Pleasure to be here.

Monika Pronczuk: Thanks for having me.

Brian: Monika, you were recently reporting from the region near the border, can you describe what conditions were like in the past few weeks at their worst and if it's gotten better?

Monika: I was at the Polish side of the border and these are extremely difficult conditions for people that are stacked there. It is one of Europe's oldest forest, it is very dense. The temperatures dropped below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Actually, I just came back yesterday and today it was the first snowfall of the season. Very, very difficult conditions. Some people that managed to cross the border into Poland, they were basically left without any organized help. This is an acute humanitarian crisis as well on the Polish side.

Brian: It sounds extremely acute if the temperatures are falling below freezing, especially. Before we go to Charlotte, Monika, how many people are there, and are people freezing to death?

Monika: It is very hard to know how many people are still out there because the Polish authorities created a two-mile wide exclusion zone which is barred to everyone except for residents. They're not letting in journalists, they're not letting in doctors, they're not letting in aid workers, sorry. It is very, very difficult to verify information. The Polish authorities themselves said there today that there are still around 10,000 migrant in Belarus, but we don't know how many are actually stranded in the forest.

Some of them are in the warehouses, some of them are in the forest, some of them are just along the border. Yes, people froze to death. At least 12 people died trying to cross the border, according to Polish authorities. Again, we have no way of verifying that information. When I was at the border, a Syrian family found by volunteer medics, for example, told the medics that they lost a one-year old baby in the forest and we don't know how many more stories like that are out there.

Brian: Wow. Charlotte, if you look at a map, for people who don't know the map of Europe and the Middle East, if we're talking about people coming from Syria, and Iraq, and Yemen, Belarus is not there. You'd have to cross the Black Sea and then go hundreds of miles north through Ukraine to get to Belarus before you try to try to make a left turn and go west into Poland to get into Europe proper or toward Western Europe. Explain why these migrants are leaving countries like those and winding up in countries like these?

Charlotte: Yes. That that's exactly it. This is why the perception is, throughout Europe, that this crisis was one orchestrated by the authoritarian leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, because indeed, you don't just walk across the border from Syria to Belarus, it's quite a long journey to make. Essentially, the Belarusian authorities were facilitating visas for people to fly from hubs where there were a lot of refugees. From-- well, sorry, not where there were a lot of refugees, but where there were a lot of people who had ambitions to come to Europe. We're looking at from Istanbul, from Baghdad, from places in the Middle East.

People were flying after getting these visas issued by the Belarusian flying into Minsk, the capital of Belarus, where they were put up in accommodation, and the allegations go that they were accompanied directly to the border by the Belarusian authorities. This was an attempt by Lukashenko to exploit the EU's fear of migrants, of migration, of an influx of refugees.

It's a very calculated decision by Lukashenko because he will have observed over the years, since the 2015 refugee crisis, how increasingly paranoid the European Union has become of any new large movements of people. It's a very weak spot, and he was exploiting that when he made this orchestrated campaign of migration towards that border with the European Union.

Brian: Monika, can you explain what happened when migrants first attempted to cross the border into Poland?

Monika: Well, so the Polish border has been fortified with a barbed wire fence, and also the Polish authorities sent something like 15,000 additional troops to guard the border. When there were attempts to, and there have been attempts to cross the border, and to go through the border fence, not just once, but several times in the last weeks.

The most famous one is, the big one that happens at the Bruzgi-Kuźnica border crossing, and they were met with tear gas and water cannons, but every day Polish border guards is reporting new attempts of migrants trying to cross the border, and of them preventing it, which in fact, means often meeting them with tear gas. Some migrants that I spoke to told me that they-- so I've met them in the forest on Sunday, and they told me that they have indeed tried, with the aid of Belarusian security officers, to cross the border, and they've been met with tear gas from the Polish side.

Brian: Oh, it sounds excruciating and cruel. You can have a border policy, you don't want more migrants than you want, but the cannons and the tear gas, I guess the question is why, Monika?

Monika: Well, the ruling party in Poland, Law and Justice, has built much of its political support on this anti-migrant and anti-refugee platform. They really have presented themselves as defenders of Europe and of the European Union's border.

Brian: Should we say of Christianity versus Islam? Is that part of it?

Monika: That is part of it. That is a big part of it indeed, and the fact that those asylum seekers mostly come from the Middle East is not neutral in this situation, because Poland actually does have many migrants from Ukraine and Belarus itself, as well as actual refugees from Belarus, like members of the opposition to Lukashenko's regime. This was just a very logical continuation of their policy and politics in a way. The result is that those people are deterred from asking for asylum in regular border crossings, which they have the right to, according to international law, because those border crossings are shut.

Yes, they are in a way forced, both by circumstances, but also by the Belarusian security officers, and we've heard many reports of asylum seekers saying that they were actually, in a way, forced by Belarusian border guards to cross the border. They were deterred and prevented by Belarusians to go back to Minsk, and go back home, in a way. Some of them managed to cross the border, then, very often, they are pushed back by the Polish border guards. They become like this ping-pong ball in a game between the Polish and Belarusian border guards.

Brian: Listeners, we've taken most of our time in this segment just to explain the situation, because it's worth talking about, even for us here, far away from there. I don't know if we have any listeners who have personal connections to this situation, but we can take one or two phone calls if anybody does at 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692 if you're connected to Belarus or Poland, or the Arab immigrant communities, who are being stopped at the Belarus-Poland border, 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692.

Charlotte, you wrote that these policies have "Given authoritarian states a roadmap to blackmail." Which policies do you mean? Which authoritarian states, and are you talking about a roadmap to blackmail that is more broadly applicable than in this situation?

Charlotte: Yes. If we look back at what the EU has done to try and address the migration situation over the years, a lot of those policies have involved outsourcing management of their borders to regimes with, shall we say, unsavory or questionable human rights records. A key one is Libya. Even before the refugee crisis that we talk about in 2015, going back to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who obviously, was the Libyan dictator, the EU did a deal with him back in 2011, paying him €6 million to cooperate on migration-related issues. Obviously, Libya was not a particularly safe country for people to be in if they were seeking asylum.

We look at deals like this, and it shows that the EU has been very willing to sacrifice some of its more noble principles about solidarity, the respect of human rights for all when it comes to their migration policy.

Another example is Turkey. After the 2015 crisis, when more than a million refugees arrived in Europe, the EU struck a deal with Turkey, in which they promised it €6 billion in aid and other incentives, trade-related incentives, visa-free travel so that Turkey would stop people leaving their coastline, traveling over the Mediterranean into Greece. Now, Turkey, has ever since used this as a bargaining chip with the European Union. Here is where we see this migration issue eroding the European Union's ability to wield its influence in areas like rule of law and human rights.

Because in examples where the European Union has tried to censure Turkey over silencing of opposition voices, or rule of law, or human rights, the Turkish officials often turn around and say, "Okay, well, it's time to scrap that deal we made with you. We're going to flood the European Union with migrants," using these very dehumanizing terms, which we see being used quite widely in Europe now to refer to people on the move.

It has given that that tension, that ability for regimes to use this as a bargaining chip, and we've seen it with Turkey. I use the example of Libya, and that's still going on now. After the fall of Gaddafi, of course, you have a regime in Libya, you have a difficult situation there, but you still have the European Union returning people to a dangerous situation in Libya.

Morocco has also been involved in blackmail before using migration. When Lukashenko made these moves recently, he was looking about long history where countries have managed to get the European Union to concede a little on their values, in order to stop the migration. It was a very calculated decision.

Brian: Your book Cast Away: Stories of Survival from Europe's Refugee Crisis, and the first part of that title, poignantly, is two words, Cast Away: Stories of Survival from Europe's Refugee Crisis. This is the Middle East refugee crisis really heading toward Europe. We're talking about something that started a decade ago now, at the beginning of the Arab Spring when the Syrian Civil War broke out.

Of course, they were already refugees from the Iraq war that we started years earlier, but I think it's really started when the Syrian Civil War broke out around 10 years ago. It's fallen out of the news in this country, in recent years, with all the other things that have been going on. Is this just a steady flow of people in this desperate situations from Iraq, from Syria, from Yemen? Of course, the Yemen Civil War has only gotten worse, but for year after year?

Charlotte: Yes, they have definitely been ebbs and flows. The levels we saw in 2015, they have been gradually going down. The deal with Turkey did stop some of those numbers, did stop those inflows of people coming across the Mediterranean. It has been going down and it might go up again slightly, but we don't see the dramatic numbers that we saw in 2015 and 2016.

Now, that's not to say that it's not going to happen again. Before 2015, in the years running up to that, from 2011, 2012, 2013, there were plenty of signs that a refugee crisis of this scale was brewing. There was concerns that all the Syrian refugees in countries like Lebanon and Jordan were not getting the support they needed. There were warnings that people might start trying to come to Europe, and that Europe should put in place a system for dealing, in a humanitarian way, with any new arrivals.

Now, that didn't happen, and then we saw that crisis in 2015, a crisis which was then exploited by far-right populist-nationalist parties. We saw a rise in support because the European Union didn't deal with it. It looked chaotic. It was very bad optics on these borders, with people queuing up, and a horrible humanitarian situation. This has been a big problem. The European Union should really have learned their lessons and be putting in place a system, so if something like this does happen again, they are prepared for it.

We're looking at a burden-sharing situation, whereby countries in the European Union agree to share the housing, the humanitarian support for any influx of new people, but the European Union is an absolute impasse over this. They cannot agree any new system on asylum and migration.

This is a big problem, because right now the numbers at the Poland-Belarus border, they really are incredibly small when we think about it. It's a few thousand people, it's a horrible humanitarian situation for them, but it's a very manageable number if they were to come into Europe. We're not seeing a huge inflow again, but should that happen, the European Union needs to be prepared. Otherwise, in the future, they're just going to further involve the far-right voices who use imagery, to boost support for themselves. There really needs to be some better planning at the EU level and some more unity really, and between the 27 nations.

Brian: Let me get one caller on here. Saanich in Newark, you're on WNYC. Hi, Saanich.

Saanich: Hi, Saanich, it's me, yes, for taking my call. The situation there is a little more complex than the way it's portrayed. I came to this country in '79 as a refugee, and I waited in Italy for permission to come. During that time, the message was that it was possible to go to Germany, and basically, if you didn't want to work for a day in your life, just go to Germany because they have very good social programs.

Now, I watch currently on YouTube, they have Russian programs in Russia, where they interview those people, and especially, I think even some of them in English. These people are saying, "We want to go to Germany," so they just want to pass through Poland. They want to go there because I think Germany pays them like €400 a week, a month, I'm not sure, but there is some monetary incentive for them. They don't want to be in Poland. Right now, this is the really situation.

I understand that Belarusians, and Russians, and Turkey found a weak way to exploit the European Union. This people that are stuck there, they're not exactly totally innocent because they really want to go to Germany and be on the German payroll, network, and get free money.

Brian: Thank you for your call. I don't know, Monika, that sounds like gross stereotyping to me, apply it to your ethnic group of choice. Oh, all these people who are in desperate situations really want is to go and live like leeches off good social programs. What'd you think when you were hearing that call?

Monica: Well, a lot of people do feel this way and it is correct to say that most of those people, although again, we have zero statistics. This is all, in a way, hearsay, but most of those people are heading west because also that's what they have been told, that this is a way-- by smugglers, that this is a way into the European Union and Germany, the Netherlands, and mostly because they have families there.

Actually, there is a substantial group of people that, especially after being pushed back and forth between Poland and Belarus, did express their will to apply for asylum in Poland, and actually some of them even lodged asylum applications with the Polish authorities. I have witnessed situations where they have been pushed back into Belarus, even after explicitly saying, "I want to apply for asylum in Poland."

About the motivation about being on the payroll, this is just a whole separate discussion. It is very difficult to say what motivates you to move from one side of the world to the other. Personally, I would say that it's not the motivation of being on a payroll, but this is why we have in place an internationally recognized system of accepting asylum applications, so that then those claims can be actually assessed and a decision can be taken whether this person has a right to stay in the country, in this case, Poland or Germany, or whether it should be sent back in a humane way to their country of origin, which is really not what is happening right now in Poland.

Brian: Charlotte, you want to take the last 30 seconds of this segment and say if you think there's a role for the United States in this crisis, or implications for the United States, as we're dealing with our own border crises and border politics all the time?

Charlotte: Well, I think all governments really have a responsibility to take a moral leadership, and that's a lot about the language that we use. I think this goes back to what your caller was talking about as well. When we talk about the motivations of people, people's motivations are very complicated.

If we don't see the people in this border as humans with the same motivations, the same hopes, fears, dreams that we all have, that's when we come into an issue, because there are many motivations, and most of them are to do with family. We have to think, if we were somewhere, and we wanted to claim asylum, or to work somewhere, where would we want to go? We'd want to go where our family or where our community are.

These are the kinds of things that are driving people on their journeys. I think we've really got to maintain that empathy, and understand that we're not that different. We've all got the same motivations in life, and we have to keep that with us when we look at these kind of crises and in the kind of language that we use, and stop referring to migratory flows and floods, and start talking about people, men, women, children, and human beings.

Brian: Charlotte McDonald-Gibson is the author of Cast Away: Stories of Survival from Europe's Refugee Crisis. Monika Pronczuk is a New York Times reporter in Brussels, covering the European Union. Thank you both so much.

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