‘Hidden zone of violence’: investigators trace over 100 migrant deaths to Poland–Belarus border regime

Among the dead following a pushback in the Polish forests was a 38-year old mother from Iraq. Her 24-week old unborn baby had also died. A boy, 16 years old, also perished in a separate pushback. His family said he was vomiting blood before he died. And then there is a Mahlet Kassa, a 28 year-old from Ethiopia. Kassa was left to die in the early morning hours in Białowieża, a forest in Poland after crossing from Belarus in February 2023. Her companions had alerted a local dairy factory in the nearby Polish town of Hajnówka, pleading for help. The security guard called the Polish border police, which then rounded them up and pushed them back to Belarus. Their appeals to rescue Kassa, who was located only a short distance away, were ignored by the Polish border guards. Days later, her body was found by Polish civil society activists. A new 341-page report published on Tuesday (8 September) by Border Forensics, a Swiss-based investigative team, and in collaboration with other civil society organisations, has documented and confirmed 102 deaths since 2021 along the Polish and Belarusian border. Another 214 remain missing at the border, suggesting that the total number of deaths could be much higher. The figures cannot be found on Polish government websites, where prosecution of criminal responsibility has broadly been brushed aside with findings that instead typically blames the deaths on hypothermia, drowning or exposure in a landscape marked by marshes, wetlands, and dense forests. But this new report describes the pushbacks that lead to their deaths as a "form of indirect violence in which harm is inflicted not through direct force, but through a series of in/actions that create conditions incompatible with survival."