The Guardian reports:

For two days the same looped recording has been blaring out from speakers on the Polish border: “Attention! Attention! Crossing the Polish border is legal only at border crossings.”

The ominous warning is directed at the thousands of asylum seekers massed in Belarus on the opposite side of the barbed wire running between the two countries.

According to Poland, Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, is deliberately provoking a new refugee crisis in Europe by organising the movement of migrants from the Middle East to Minsk and promising them a safe passage to the EU in revenge for the sanctions Brussels has imposed on his authoritarian regime.

Nearly 20,000 Polish border police, flanked by military support, are now deployed in a show of force unknown in the country since the end of the cold war.

Until a few days ago, most migrants were violently pushed back, though some managed to make it to Warsaw after hiding out in the dense forests.

Since Belarusian authorities on Monday began escorting thousands of migrants to the Polish border in a dramatic escalation of an already deadly crisis, crossing the frontier has become even more difficult.

In the forests between the two countries, where night-time temperatures fall below zero, it is the thousands of Iraqi, Syrian and Afghan families who are now paying the price, scapegoats trapped between the violence of the Polish authorities and the false promises of the Belarus. [Continue reading…]