Many thousand refugees remain massed in the immense forest of Podlachie, between Poland and Belarus.
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It has become, over the weeks, a sinister routine: every night, dozens of migrants force, with the active support of the Belarusian border guards, the barbed wires along the “green border” of the European Union, between Poland and Belarus, dotted for nearly 180 kilometers of thick forests, swamps and rivers. These incidents are not without violence: stone jets and firecrackers towards the Polish forces, provocations on the part of the Belarusian army. During these assaults, who sometimes engage up to two hundred people, the Belarus forces blind the Polish guards with stroboscopes and lasers.
On the Humanitarian Front, dedicated activists using migrants are exhausted. They are fifty to re-energize for months, to bring the first aid to those who, lost in the forest, report their distress by phone. Beyond warm clothes, food, drinks or survival kits, it is the charging batteries of cell phones that are the most coveted property. In the huge forests of podlachy, called by the migrants “La Jungle”, we can survive several days without food, but not without the GPS location of his phone.
The first week of December, the nocturnal temperatures in the region fell below – 10 ° C. It’s dark night at 4 pm. The official balance sheet of about twenty deaths is largely under measured according to activists, and local people regularly relate macabre body stories seen in forests or in swamps. Due to the legal blurred on the status of the zone, the inhabitants remain relatively discreet vis-à-vis the authorities, because any photographic documentation or videos was again recently prohibited. The place remains largely overmilitarized.
Infernal trap
After three months of total prohibition of access to the media and NGOs in the immediate vicinity of the polish side border, due to “state of emergency”, the Warsaw authorities were forced to lift these restrictions slightly . The rules remain no less draconian: the access of journalists is supervised by the army and can not be done autonomously. The media can only collect information with official, Polish and Belarus sources, and through the rare independent videos of the area. Three photoreporters who were, however, outside the prohibited sector were victims of violence from the Polish army.
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