Motyl (Butterfly) (ca. 1920s) | Michalina Janoszanka/ Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie / Public Domain Mark
On the narrow roads of the Białowieża Forest, the last primeval forest in Europe, military vehicles occupy the space with the roar of their engines. A line of cars on the forest road signals the presence of a mobile police checkpoint at the Polish-Belarusian borderland. A border guard carefully stares at the faces of the passengers, checking if everyone is “white” enough to pass. This brief inspection may include an ID check or a look inside the trunk. If it is full of shopping bags, summer clothes, or toiletry bags, a border guard may disregard it. However, dark backpacks containing thermoses, water, and first aid kits may indicate that the travelers are activists on their way to provide humanitarian support to a group of people on the move, which could lead to further questioning.
In 2021 and 2022, such checkpoints designated a border territory that encompassed 183 Polish settlements. Journalists, medics, activists, and NGOs were unable to access the area, impeding the provision of humanitarian assistance to people on the move, advocating for their rights, and reporting on the humanitarian crisis. For residents, inclusion in the zone meant constant stopovers, even harassment, while performing everyday activities. It also caused a sharp decrease in tourism, on which this region, home to a forest designated as a UNESCO Heritage Site, has relied heavily. Since then, discourse around securitization has come to overshadow the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border and the needs and agency of people crossing the European Union’s borders to seek safety, freedom, and dignity. Most recently, on March 27, the president of Poland signed a bill allowing for the temporary suspension of the right to apply for asylum. The following day, the government enacted this suspension along the Polish-Belarusian border, justifying the drastic measure as a response to the “instrumentalization of migration” by an external power and the “necessity to protect” Poland and Europe. It’s true that the revival of the migration route through Białowieża Forest in 2021 was linked to the implementation of simplified visa procedures and an increase in the number of flights to Minsk by President Lukashenko’s regime, but this change occurred in response to the sanctions imposed on Belarus by the European Union following the fraudulent Belarusian presidential elections in 2020 and the violent suppression of the “revolution of dignity.” The situation has provided Polish governments an excuse to present people on the move as elements of a geopolitical game between the EU, and Belarusian and Russia.
It is unlikely that a casual walker will encounter people on the move during a stroll in the Białowieża woods. Asylum seekers usually traverse dense forests and swamps, funneled into this hostile terrain by the state’s strategic placement of security sites along easier routes and closing official ways of entering the country and applying for asylum. At the same time, the old forest offers protection from uniform services and drones, as well as hideouts for resting along the way. But occasionally, these concealed routes run parallel to official tourist trails, with the sounds of chatting and laughter of the one group of walkers reaching the ones in hiding. Though physically close, the social categories of the walkers are far apart—a distance determined by the legacies of colonialism and racialization.
The forest itself bears traces of the violence inflicted on nature. Oil spills from military vehicles, animals run over by trucks, tree bark scraped off by cars in natural reserves, and grains of sand carrying invasive species are just a few noticeable signs of the impact of border fortification.
If one looks carefully while walking in the forest, one may notice objects lying on the ground that testify to the presence of people. Trekking shoes, rubber boots, waterproof clothes, and other “assisting objects” found close to the roads may mean their owners exited the forest and, hopefully, arrived at a safe place; they also reflect the considerable preparations travelers must make at the beginning of such journeys.
Deeper into the forest lie torn clothes, wet sleeping bags, empty food cans, and bottles of water—possibly traces of a stopover. The labels may tell us something about the people who used them and where they came from. Labels in Polish suggests that a group requested humanitarian assistance to bring food and clothes, or to provisionally treat wounds from beatings by Polish or Belarusian soldiers, cuts from concertina wire, and other injuries from crossing the wall. The encounters were probably brief and mostly silent to avoid drawing the attention of the authorities, which, for a group of people on the move, would result in violence and forced return to Belarus.
Continuing the walk, sometimes one can spot phones, family photos, diplomas, or other personal items of clear emotional value, often torn apart. These items indicate that the group was apprehended and likely pushed back to Belarus without the opportunity to request international protection—their possessions lost while running away or stolen by border guards and army officers during pushbacks. Recently, it has become less likely to encounter such items. One explanation is that the increased fortification of the border means that people on the move are much more likely to be apprehended; another is that, after four years of escalating border violence, people refrain from taking any valuable belongings with them, as they know that they are very likely to be stolen.
Walking back from the forest, one might pass by a local cemetery. These graveyards reveal the ethnic and religious history of the region, where Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims once lived side by side. In a corner of the cemetery, there may be a few graves with plates bearing foreign names or simply “NN” marking the resting places of people who died during their journey—a sorry form of asylum for the Polish state to offer people on the move.
The 187-kilometer-long, 5.5-meter-high metal wall, topped with concertina wire and an additional fence made of three coils of razor wire, is enhanced by thousands of cameras and hundreds of meters of detection cables. The buzzing of drones over the forest is a reminder of the rapid development of border technology advanced by the largest defense companies.
Closer to the wall, border guards may ask the purpose of one’s visit. Currently, the no-entry zone covers 60 kilometers, and ranges from 200 meters to four kilometers from the border. The metal fence on the Polish-Belarusian border features 100 small gates, which activists call “pushback gates.” While the authorities claim these gates are for maintenance purposes, the testimonies of the people on the move say otherwise. Every day, guards physically shove people who intend to seek asylum in Europe back through the gates and across the border with brutal force.
Any visitor will notice the ongoing fortification of the border, the militarization of the landscape, and the pervasiveness of state control mechanisms. But whether or not one believes the state narratives that these are necessary protections against “danger” walking in from the outside depends on how closely one has listened to the racialized remarks of the border guards, or looked at the dropped family photographs or first-aid kits, or traced the NN lettering carved on local gravestones—the mark of an unknown traveler who didn’t survive the journey through the forest.
