According to the Ocalenie Foundation, an organization which provides assistance to refugees, 32 refugees are trapped on the Polish border with Belarus, close to Usnarz Górny. They include women and a 15 year old girl.

The refugees can’t move forward and they can’t go back. They are trapped on the border surrounded by the Polish military on one side, and Belarusian soldiers on the other. The standoff has been going on for about 20 days already, and they say that they have no water or food. Images show them soaked by the rain and freezing. One of the women is complaining about difficulties breathing and pain in the kidneys. Her condition is critical. It is not exactly clear what’s wrong with her, because no medical workers are present. There has been no help, either from the Polish side or from Belarus.

The Ocalenie Foundation also reports that the health of other refugees is also deteriorating: 25 people are ill, 12 of them seriously. Yet potential help is just a few hundred metres away. For weeks activists have been trying to organize support and to provide food, water and necessities to the group of trapped refugees, but the border guards are actively preventing contact. Belarusian authorities have closed the country’s borders to prevent the refugees from returning. Poland is arguing that the refugees are currently on Belarusian territory, meaning they should apply for asylum in that country.

The situation all over the Eastern EU-border is tense and inhumane. According to activists’ reports, illegal push-backs from Poland to Belarus are happening on a regular basis. These are the actions of state services which prevent migrants from applying for international protection by forcing them to return to Belarus after crossing the Polish border, even when they declare their will for protection. The actions of the border guards are violating both human rights and the Polish Constitution and are exposing refugees to unnecessary danger.

The violations by the Polish border guards, who are commissioned by the Defence Ministry, have caused great indignation in Poland. Protests demanding that the refugees are welcome have taken place all over the country and are supported by the left parties. Demonstrators hold posters and banners with slogans saying: “Border of Shame”, “Enough cruelty!”, “Enough of the policy of torture and humiliation!”, “No human is illegal”, “We do not want Polish borders of death”, “Decency is more important than order”, “Accept Refugees, kick out the Nazis.”

There are fundraising campaigns to help collect food, water, clothes, tents, sleeping bags, and money for legal aid. The MEP of the left party Razem, Maciej Konieczny, was admitted by the border guard to meet the group of refugees. He managed to hand over sleeping bags and powers of attorney for legal representation in Poland.  Grzegorz Pietruczuk, the only left-wing mayor of a district (Bielany in Warsaw) offered to provide housing for Afghan families after they are allowed to enter Poland.

Fortress Europe and “Migration Diplomacy” 

This group of Afghan refugees is not an isolated case. Soon after they arrived, information reached the public about nine Somalian women trapped on the Polish-Belarus border near the village of Bobrówka. Many groups of migrants, including women and children, have arrived at the Polish border to the West of Belarus and at the Latvian and Lithuanian borders to the North. While some of them are Belarusians seeking refuge from Lukashenko’s regime, many more are Middle Eastern refugees – mostly Iranians, Afghanis, Syrians, Kurds, and members of the Yazidi minority in Iraq. They’re hoping to ultimately reach the EU.

The governments of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland are interpreting the increase in migrants reaching their territory as a threat to their national security. Speaking to the Financial Times, the Lithuanian president, Gitanas Nauseda, accused the Belarusian authorities of engaging in a “hybrid attack against Europe” by offering package travel deals via the state-run tourist agency Tsentrkurort.

On Monday 23rd August at a press briefing near the Belarus frontier, Polish defence minister Mariusz Blaszczak said “we are dealing with an attack on Poland. It is an attempt to trigger a migration crisis”. Many commentators see the reason for the current escalation at the Belarusian borders as an effect of sanctions which the EU imposed on Belarus last year. It is also an impact of the politics of its neighboring countries, especially Latvia and Poland, who present themselves as allies of the Belarusian opposition and take in people fleeing Lukashenko’s regime.

The kind of “migration diplomacy” implemented by Lukashenko is nothing new. A similar situation occurred in the aftermath of 2015 when the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan adopted a more aggressive stance toward the European Union. Erdoğan threatened to flood Europe with migrants if European Union leaders did not offer him a better deal to keep refugees in Turkey.

In May 2021, Morocco froze a deal with the European Union about managing  migration to the Spanish exclave, Ceuta. The reason was Spain’s decision to offer medical treatment to Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Frente Polisario, a political organisation claiming liberation for West Sahara from Moroccan occupation. Fearing a new refugee influx, Poland is increasing its security measures on the border with Belarus by building a 2.5m high wall, similar to the one built by Hungary on its border with Serbia in 2015, and Lithuanian soldiers are installing razor wire on the border with Belarus. Turkey and Greece are both installing walls and surveillance systems to prevent asylum seekers from Afghanistan from reaching Europe.

It’s a disturbing state of affairs considering the various reports pointing out that increased border security leads directly to violence against refugees. It puts them at risk of returning to unsafe countries and leads to a disturbing rise in avoidable deaths, as countries close off certain migration routes, forcing migrants to look for other, often more dangerous, alternatives. This is a fatal sign of a failure of European migration policy. EU politics are leading to migrants being detained and subjected to gross human rights violations in transit countries in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, West Asia and Africa.

The argument propagated by the right-wing and liberal media saying that letting migrants in would favor Lukashenko and Putin is dehumanizing and acts as a cover for the real reasons why people decide to leave their homes. It is also is the main reason for the polarisation and destabilization of society. The Polish authorities are running a heated campaign using the state-owned media, presenting refugees as a threat to health, security, and stability. This has been accompanied by right wing politicians declaring the need to “protect the Polish family and guarantee security for the nation from possible terrorist attacks”. This form of fear management policy was previously used by politicians in 2015. The racist rhetoric turned out to be successful: in May 2015 72% of Poles were in favor of letting refugees in, in October 2015 – after a massive hate campaign – the support sank to 21%.

European countries have adopted policies of outsourcing migration outside of the EU to keep migrants out of their own territory at all costs. The securitisation of the EU’s asylum and immigration regime is currently funded by billions of Euros. The idea that a hard external border is important has been imposed into the European economic integration project and serves to construct refugees as the dangerous Other.

Capitalism needs borders in order to maintain its system of wealth accumulation through maximum exploitation. The borders of the European Union are entangled with global postcolonial politics of race and the global neoliberal politics of labour mobility and subordination that produce and capitalise upon these racialized differences. Poland’s policy of marginalisation and exclusion of racialized non-Europeans aims at stabilising the internal economical order. Thus capitalist territorial imaginations remain central to the European project.

Eastern European Route

The human rights violations happening at the Eastern border of the European Union aren’t new. Since 2016, activists and human rights organisations have been reporting cases of regular disregard of EU- and international law for people trying to apply for international protection at the Terespol/Brześć.

People have been camped for weeks on the train platform on the Belarusian side of the Polish border sometimes, trying to cross. The Polish Border Guards arbitrarily refused passage to refugees, mainly from Chechnya, Ukraine and Tajikistan. According to many reports, the vast majority who tried to pass at official border crossing points were returned immediately and refused the right to seek asylum. Officers refused to submit an application for international protection. The main reasons for the refusal  were the lack of valid travel documents and a claim that those people were  “economic migrants”.

In 2020, the European Court of Human Rights decided that Poland has ignored applications for asylum submitted by newcomers to the Border Guard officers, and violated several articles of the European Convention on Human Rights (including the order to protect against torture and inhuman or degrading treatment). There have been cases reported which expose the inhumane treatment of migrants by the Polish and Belarusian border authorities including sending back Chechen refugees to Russia and violent treatment by armed border guards.

The European Commission has maintained cooperation with Belarus since 2016, and supports it financially in the construction and/or renovation of detention centres. While the EU is sanctioning Belarus and refusing to recognize Lukashenko as the lawful president, the cooperation on migration continues. Once again, this shows the hypocrisy of the  European Union’s border regime: it presents itself as a protector of fundamental rights while equipping regimes violating those rights.

Although European nations may have formally rejected their colonial past, there is still a deeply uneven and imperialist power balance between Europe and countries of the Global South. Western powers are unable to face the consequences of leading and/or participating in the imperialist war in Afghanistan, including an inability to rescue people and establishing safe escape routes. This clearly shows the brutal failure of Western interventionism and the idea of “peace and state building” which is based on domination-submission dynamics which aim to maintain the peripheral status of the region in global capitalism.

It is time to take responsibility and face the consequences of years of intended destabilization and exploitation in the region. Countries on the outskirts of the European Union need to follow international law instead of breaking it. People seeking asylum must be let into the European Union while their cases are handled. This is the minimum that must be guaranteed under the current conditions.

The Left should go even further and demand opening the borders and freedom of movement as a fundamental right. We must  criticize the European asylum system and migration law, as part of global migration management, which creates and reproduces inequality and secures Europe’s position in global capitalism through restrictions on immigration. The function of such restrictions is on the one hand to maintain a high competition between workers, so that they agree to  work for less, and on the other to keep the undocumented migrants down, so they can be even more easily exploited and intimidated with the threat of deportation. More restrictions will never stop migration.

The economic needs of workers struggling to make ends meet will force them to cross borders, no matter what the risk is. Borders exist almost exclusively for the world’s working classes. Fortress Europe is becoming more and more militarized, as European powers fear the uncontrolled migration from the Global South. While there are very few legal routes for migrants in the global context, for the world’s billionaires and their capital it is quite the opposite. Their capital can flow under the almost borderless globalized economy.

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared that “the working men have no country” which means that national divisions are just another obstacle preventing the working class from realising their common interests. A common struggle for freedom of movement is an essential part of international working class solidarity and a basis to build networks of resistance.

Gallery 1: more photos from the Poland-Belarus border

Gallery 2 – photos of the protests in Poland (first picture – 2nd day of protest in Wrocław (01.09.2021). Others taken from the Pracownicza Demokracja facebook page. Reproduced with permission)

At this time, I am in contact with people who are desperately trying to flee from Afghanistan. I also am in contact with people who left Afghanistan years ago, and with people who have many questions.

Alongside the question of how we can now help people to escape Afghanistan, many are pressed by the question of what lessons should be learned from the fiasco of the War in Afghanistan. 20 years of war in Afghanistan with the participation of the German Armed Forces have not brought peace and democracy. On the contrary: the dramatic images from Afghanistan make clear the failures of western interventionist policy.

In this FAQ, which will be continuously updated, I ask questions and attempt to provide answers.

Why did the USA and the German Armed Forces intervene in Afghanistan?

The terror attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington served as the justification for the invasion of Afghanistan which began in October 2001. At the time, some argued that by toppling the Taliban, we could fight international terrorism and defend human rights. For the USA, however, it was never about that. In actuality, not a single Afghan was among the 9/11 attackers. The war against Afghanistan promised a fast victory. From the perspective of US foreign policy, a swift victory in Afghanistan would generate the necessary momentum for further goals: the war against Iraq and other so-called „rogue states,“ which the US President George W. Bush described as the „axis of evil.“ The plans for the intervention in Afghanistan had already been in the works for a long time. The goal was to establish geostrategic influence and a military base in the oil-rich Middle East and Southern-Central Asia.

Thus the German Armed Forces began the longest operation in its history. The Defence Minister of the day, Peter Struck of the Social Democratic Party, justified the operation by claiming that “the security the German Federal Republic will be defended in the Hindu Kush.” For the Red-Green Federal Government, it was also an opportunity to demonstrate German military presence and to restructure the German Armed Forces into an army capable of global deployment. The Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer of the Greens, summarised the power interests behind the operation as follows: “the decision, “Germany will not participate,” would mean a weaking of Europe and, eventually, it would mean us losing influence over the design of a multilateral politics of responsibility. This is exactly what is at stake in the coming years.”

For Germany, Afghanistan was first and foremost a testing ground for the restructuring of the German Armed Forces into a global actor. Alongside American counterparts, the German Armed Forces grew into their new duties, gained experience in combat, learned to operate drones and participated in the systematic murder of opposing combatants.

At the International Conference on Afghanistan in Bonn in December 2001, Hamid Karzai was selected to become the new president of the country. Afghan opposition movements were excluded from these negotiations. President Karzai established a patronage system with the involvement of competing warlords, tribal leaders, drug bosses and other powerful groups. Ever since, soaring corruption and a flourishing opium trade characterised both the government of Karzai and that of his successor. This fed the hatred of the Afghan civilian population towards the occupation. The NATO military operation ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) effectively became the military guarantor of the Karzai regime’s security. The NATO allies came to rely on the support of these warlords and corrupt politicians and marketed this arrangement as engagement for human rights and democracy.

Who are the Taliban?

The Taliban are deeply reactionary. Their victory is a new setback for the women of Afghanistan. The origin of the Taliban is deeply interwoven with the endless interventions, occupations, civil wars and corruption in Afghanistan. The Taliban are a product of the US and Pakistani interference in the Afghan-Soviet War in the 1970s, and were initially recruited from destitute religious schools among the refugee camps in Pakistan. With weapons, cash and training, they were supported by Saudi Arabia, the USA, Pakistan and Germany and trained to drive back Soviet influence in the Afghan-Soviet War. The Taliban advocated for the overcoming of tribal mentalities and conflicts among the various warlords and were therefore able to re-establish the unity of Afghanistan under their domination. The left-wing opposition in Afghanistan were, for the most part, marginalised due to their cooperation with the Soviet Union in the War against the civilian population.

The Taliban’s return to power cannot be understood aside from the devastation, which the NATO intervention brought to Afghanistan.

Doesn’t the triumph of the Taliban, and the chaos in the wake of the USA and Germany’s withdrawal, show that the withdraw was a mistake?

With the fall of Kabul, the narrative that the NATO intervention was building a democratic society modelled on western ideals, through the build-up of local security forces, has finally fallen apart. The US-backed government in Kabul was hated. This hatred towards the regime, widely seen as a corrupt puppet government, explains how the Taliban were able to capture all major cities across the country in just a few days without meeting significant resistance.

The suffering, which the 20 year occupation brought to the Afghan people, provided fertile soil for the Taliban to regain its strength.

The German Federal Government and its allies ignored all warnings that the consequences of the war would enable a resurgence of the Taliban. It was not the withdrawal of international armed forces that caused the chaos; rather, the chaos is a consequences of 20 years of war.

Wasn’t the NATO intervention also about women’s rights?

The argument that the war against the Taliban was about values and human rights is hypocritical. Monica Hauser from the women’s rights organisation Medica Mondiale has said, “you don’t need the Taliban, for men to still have deeply misogynistic ideas in their heads.” The NATO-backed government, too, has neglected the rights of women and girls.

The western occupation of Afghanistan brought an improvement of living conditions only to a small minority of women. The majority of the population never benefited from the war. On the contrary, despite massive international assistance, the societal situation is catastrophic. Since April 2020, around 80 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. According to a report from 2019, around 3.7 million children in Afghanistan do not attend school, 60 percent of whom are girls.

Women’s rights were instrumentalised by the Federal Government. The attitude towards women held by the royal family of Saudi Arabia is similar to that of the Taliban, and yet the Federal Government sells weapons to Saudi Arabia. These weapons, in turn, prolong the war in Yemen.

Afghan human rights defenders, journalists, and all those, who have fought for the rights of women, have now been abandoned as Europe shuts its borders to refugees. Human rights are indivisible, and are the first casualties of war.

We were told that it was necessary to first establish security in order for development to be possible. Isn’t that true?

The focus on the establishment of military security in Afghanistan has brought neither peace nor development. On the contrary, the so-called “civil-military cooperation” subordinated civil assistance to military goals.

The humanitarian situation and the human costs of the war are catastrophic. The IPPNW estimates that in the period from 2001 to 2013, 170,000 Afghan civilians were killed directly in the war. 59 German soldiers lost their lives, 35 of whom were killed in attacks or in combat. The involvement of the German Armed Forces has cost more than 12 billion Euros.

In 2020 alone, nearly 9,000 civilians and over 10,000 Afghan soldiers were killed. According to official statistics, at least 3.54 million people are internally displaced within Afghanistan due to the conflict, plus an additional 1.1 million persons displaced due to drought and floods. Over 2.7 million Afghan refugees are registered outside the country.

The Afghan human rights activist and politician Malalai Joya has said, “the intervention has not changed Afghanistan for the better at all. Instead, it has plunged the country deeper into suffering and tragedy.“ For years, The Left has been warning that both the West‘s support for the corrupt Afghan government and the principle of military „security“ were destined to fail and would give the Taliban renewed momentum. This is now exactly what has happened, and the price for it is being paid by the people who now try to flee.

What is the German Government trying to achieve via its mandate for military evacuations?

The German Federal Government has completely failed in the evacuation of vulnerable people from Afghanistan. Despite all warnings, they never had a realistic assessment of the situation and therefore significantly delayed the rescue operation. Bureaucratic obstacles further hindered the early departure of local employees.

For years, the German Government has failed to provide straightforward support to its local support workers and their families in Afghanistan. On the 21^st of April this year, as in previous years, the members of parliament from The Left demanded the generous relocation to Germany of local Afghan support workers, and has continued to do so since. On the 22^nd of June, the parliamentary faction of The Left demanded the evacuation of all local Afghan support workers. This was rejected by all other parties.

Since the 17^th of August, the German Armed Forces have been flying people out of Kabul. Now the Federal Government has given the Armed Forces a mandate which explicitly allows the use of military force throughout all of Afghanistan, according to which German commando forces are to be deployed. German citizens and – pending adequate capacity – employees of international NGOs and “further designated persons” are to be evacuated.

According to the legal services of the German Foreign Office, the still-valid mandate explicitly intends the evacuation as an option for military deployment. This shows that the German Government, with the support of the Federal Parliament, intends to shift the responsibility for the disastrous evacuation onto other shoulders.

The German military has now sent special forces helicopters to Kabul. These are intended for use in rescuing people from difficult-to-reach areas. However, the deployment of German special forces poses an enormous risk of escalation.

The underlying problem is that the group of people eligible for evacuation is tightly limited. Human rights activists and at-risk Afghan civilians are not on the priority list. Many of them have waited desperately at the airport in Kabul over the last few days and have now been turned away. According to reports from people at the scene, chartered civilian airplanes, which were sent to evacuate human rights activists, have being prevented from landing by the US Army. The German Government must put immediate pressure on the USA to ensure that no aircraft are prevented from landing.

The largest group of people attempting to reach safety are internally displaced persons. The do not make it onto the evacuation lists of the US or German governments.

What should The Left demand?

There need to be fast and unbureaucratic efforts to evacuate not only the local Afghan employees of the German Armed Forces, but also the local employees of German international development organisations, human rights defenders, media representatives, and their families. Furthermore, Germany must now put pressure on the US Government, which is in negotiations with the Taliban over the evacuation.

The Left must advocate for the intake and accommodation of all persons who need or want to flee. There must be a massive investment into the UN Refugee Fund for Afghanistan. Deportations must be immediately and permanently stopped. There must be open escape routes into the neighbouring countries around Afghanistan and into, and throughout, the European Union.

What lessons do we need to learn from Afghanistan?

With the defeat of western imperialism in Afghanistan, the interventionalist policy of NATO has failed dramatically. In the German Federal Government, doubts are growing about operations such as in Afghanistan and Mali. What The Left has said all along has proven to be true: democracy, human rights and development cannot be imposed from outside with bombs. The Left must maintain pressure, both within parliament and on the streets, for an immediate stop to foreign military operations and to all weapons exports, and for open borders for all people in need.

This is a translation of a German press statement which was published on 24 August 2021. Translation: Tim Redfern. Reproduced with permission