By Álvaro Peñas
Migratory pressure from Belarus against Latvia, Lithuania and Poland has caused the Polish parliament to declare a state of emergency in the border area, namely in the provinces of Podlasia and Lublin, for the first time since the fall of the communist regime. The Sejm (Polish parliament) approved the state of emergency on 2 September by 247 votes to 168 and rejected an opposition motion to lift it on Monday. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Moraviecki has not hesitated to blame the Belarusian state services for this wave of migration and denounced that “every day on the border with Belarus, we see hundreds of provocations. In August alone, there were 4,000 attempts to illegally cross our border”. In his opinion, the attitude of Lukashenko’s government justifies the adoption of a state of emergency and he has called for the support of the opposition in dealing with the crisis.
However, the Polish opposition, whose main representative is the Civic Platform (PO, the Polish People’s Party), does not seem to be in favour of defending national borders. In a scene bordering on the ridiculous, PO MPs Franciszek Sterczewski (detained in the cover image) and Klaudia Jachira went to the border to help and bring food to migrants on the Belarusian side and, under the cameras of photographers, confronted the stunned border guards. After achieving the desired media effect, the liberals left the border to be replaced by left-wing activists. The border guards reported damage to several points of the border fence.
One such attack on the fence resulted in the arrest of 13 leftists, twelve Poles and one Dutchman. One of those arrested is activist Bartosz Kramek, chairman of the supervisory board of the Open Dialogue Foundation. On 23 June Kramek was arrested and brought to court. Following the prosecutor’s request that he should not be released until the trial, one hundred “personalities” led by Lech Walesa published a letter of support for the activist in the left-wing newspaper Gaceta Wyborcza. As for the Open Dialogue Foundation, although its name leaves little room for doubt, the NGO denies Polish media claims linking it to the Open Society even though its president, Lyudmyla Kozlovska, Kramek’s wife, maintains a personal friendship with George Soros. On its website it states that its private donors do not belong to the US tycoon’s network, but acknowledges its collaboration with the Open Society in support of Euromaidan in Ukraine and judges Soros’ work positively. Created in 2009 and based in Warsaw and Brussels, the ODF defends “human rights” in Eastern Europe, serves as an advisor to supranational bodies such as the EU and the UN, and is particularly aggressive against the Polish government, which it accuses of dictatorship. Exactly the same “modus operandi” as the Soros network.
But the “NGO” that is most attacking the Polish government over the Belarusian border crisis, accusing Poland of inhumane treatment of migrants, is a network of left-wing organisations called “Abolish Frontex”, a reference to the EU border agency. With rhetoric similar to Black Lives Matter, defining Europe as the axis of evil, colonialism, exploitation and slavery, Abolish Frontex advocates the disappearance of borders and “papers for all”. The same goal stated by activist Kramek in a recent interview: “Let’s go there and symbolically tear down the barbed wire fences. We must protest actively and decisively. The borders are only in our heads”.
Within the list of organisations that are part of Abolish Frontex there are a large number of far-left organisations, including some Spanish ones and even “Open Arms”, and it did not take long to find a well-known NGO of the Soros network, Fundacja Ocalenie (Salvation Foundation). Created in the 1990s to help refugees from the Chechen war, the foundation began receiving funding from the Open Society in 2006, under Piotr Bystrianin, who in 2019 sponsored an EU-sponsored project to host refugee families in Poland, “Refugees Welcome Poland”. Since then, the foundation has expanded its reach and started working with LGBT and pro-abortion groups, also funded by Soros. Now, with the crisis provoked by the arrival of refugees from Belarus, the foundation has launched a new campaign against the Polish government, denouncing its “lack of humanity” towards migrants. It is a campaign that, above all, is being publicised by international media.
In the past, these actions have ended with condemnation of the Polish government by EU institutions, threats of withdrawal of European funds and a campaign for “human rights” activists who were elevated to the status of “heroes”. We saw this with abortion and the National Women’s Strike. This time, however, Soros’s lackeys have it tougher. Latvia and Lithuania have closed their borders and more and more countries, unlike in 2015, support the position of Hungary and Poland. Viktor Orbán wrote last December that the time had come to put an end to Soros’s European joyride. The truth is that the end of that journey still seems a long way off, but for the first time it could become a reality.