UNGA76: Poland’s leader speaks about Belarusian prisoners, Lukashenka regime’s fostering migration crisis on EU borders
During his speech at the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda touched upon the subject of Belarusian political political prisoners and raised the issue of the current migration crisis on the borders of the European Union.
The text of his address was published on the UN official website on the night of September 22.
Solidarity in combating pandemic and solidarity in struggle for democracy
At the beginning of his speech, Duda put a special emphasis on the word ‘solidarity’ which Poles ‘know since the cradle’, as in their history it refers to a large independent trade union established in 1980 by workers in the plants who went on strike against the communist regime, and who in the 1980`s and 1990`s inspired millions of people across the globe in their fight for the democratic or labour rights. In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the Polish leader wondered whether ‘the rich world, of the affluent North’ showed enough solidarity and admitted his having ‘serious doubts’ about it.
At the same time, the speaker sounded a note of warning that COVID-19 allowed the world to easily forget about ‘multiple misfortunes plaguing different parts of our globe, often in the vicinity of our homes’. He made mention of the externally supported civil war in Syria, the tragedy in Libya, the war in Ukraine where over 13 thousand people died since the beginning of the Russian aggression; according to Duda, the ‘response of the rich North’ to the drama of the Ukrainian nation was the construction of a large Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which will carry Russian gas to Western Europe ‘bringing further billions in revenue to the aggressor’.
“Covid-19 also obscures to many people the events in neighboring Belarus, where since August 2020 hundreds of thousands of people have come out daily for peaceful protests demanding just one thing: respect for the election result. In response they encountered police batons, tear gas and, often times, bullets used by the regime to defend itself against its own people,” he stressed.
Are Belarusian political prisoners really guilty of anything?
Addressing the participants in the UN GA session, Andrzej Duda attempted to draw their attention to more than 650 persons being held in prisons in Belarus. In his opinion, they are ‘patriots, who simply wanted to choose their leader in fair elections’. Duda also recalled the harsh prison sentences (11 and 10 years) recently imposed on activist Maryia Kalesnikava and lawyer Maksim Znak as well as the wrongous detention of Andżelika Borys and Andrzej Poczobut, the leaders of the Polish minority in Belarus, and demanded the release of Belarusian prisoners of conscience.
“What have these people done that was so wrong? Nothing. They wanted to claim the same right to elect their government that the French, the Poles, the Americans, the Koreans, the Australians, or the people of Argentina have. The wanted the free elections, in which many of us run, the Presidents of the free world and the importance of which the UN General Assembly so emphatically expressed in a series of historic resolutions: ‘Enhancing the effectiveness of the principle of periodic and genuine elections’,” he said.
Poland becomes home for 150K Belarusians
150 thousand Belarusians found shelter and employment in Poland, including thousands of protesters, the president noted, adding that he had recently told ‘Belarusian brothers’ that Poland would be their home for as long as they deemed it appropriate and necessary.
“But solidarity comes at a price. Because regimes tend to defend themselves not only against their own citizens but also against democratic states. The response of the authoritarian regime in Belarus has taken the shape of an unprecedented hybrid attack on the borders of Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, the three countries on the eastern flank of NATO and the European Union. For many weeks, the regime of Alyaksandr Lukashenka has been bringing tens of thousands of desperate inhabitants of the Middle East into its country, forcing them under police batons to cross our borders in an attempt to create an artificial ‘humanitarian crisis’,” he said.
Andrzej Duda pointed out that the Lukashenka regime remained deaf to Poland’s offers to provide migrants with humanitarian aid, treating those people as ‘pawns in a political game’. He promised that Poland ‘would not succumb’ and would never accept instrumental treatment of migrants.
