A Migrant as a “Human Shield”
- Admin of the NAM
- Dec 2
- 3 min read
Legal qualification:
Article 7(1)(k) Rome Statute: Other inhumane acts (deliberate use of people as a tool, creation of inhumane conditions causing suffering).
UN Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants(state-organized scheme).
F.A., 28, was an English teacher in Mosul, Iraq. After his city was destroyed by ISIS and later during the fighting for its liberation, he lost his job and home. He was an educated man, far from war, simply seeking safety for his young wife and three-year-old daughter. In August 2021, he saw an ad on Facebook posted by a “travel agency.” It offered an “easy and legal” path to Europe. Route: Baghdad — Minsk — Germany. Price: $5000 per person. The agency claimed to have an “official agreement” with Belarusian authorities.
F.A. sold his car and his wife’s gold jewelry. They received Belarusian tourist visas directly at Baghdad airport. The Iraqi Airways plane was filled with similar “tourists” — families from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan.
In Minsk, they were met. The first two days looked legitimate: they were placed in Hotel Belarus, even given a short city tour. “Coordinators”—strong Russian-speaking men in civilian clothes—told them to wait. On the third night, large tourist buses arrived. “We’re going on an excursion to Hrodna,” the coordinator said.
There were about 100 people in the buses. They were driven for several hours and dropped in the middle of a dark forest. “Now go,” the coordinator said, pointing his flashlight. “Poland is there. Walk straight.”
When people hesitated, men in Belarusian military uniforms with dogs emerged from the darkness. They didn’t speak English. They simply pushed people forward with rifle butts, shouting: “Forward! Go!”
F.A., his wife, and daughter walked with the crowd through the forest. After an hour, they reached a tall barbed-wire fence. In several places the wire had been cut. “Look, an opening!” someone shouted. “Belarusians helped us!”
They crawled through the gap. They were in Poland. They walked for another hour before searchlights lit them up — a Polish border patrol. The Poles detained them. They cried, begged for help, showed their children. “Asylum! Please!” F.A. shouted. The guards gave them water and rations but said camps were overcrowded. After a few hours they loaded them into trucks and drove them back to the border — pushing them through the same gap back into Belarus.
And then the nightmare began. On the Belarusian side, the same soldiers in camouflage were already waiting. “No going back!” they shouted, forming shields. “To Poland! Go to Poland!”
They were trapped. In the no-man’s-land between the two borders, in a narrow strip of forest. On one side — Poles, not letting them deeper into the country. On the other — Belarusians, not allowing them to return to Minsk or even to a Belarusian village.
“We spent eight days in that forest,” F.A. later told volunteers. “It was hell. Temperatures fell to zero at night. We had no food, no tents, no warm clothes. My daughter cried constantly. We drank water from a swamp. Belarusian soldiers sometimes came. They didn’t give us food. They brought more migrants and pushed them onto us. They filmed our suffering on their phones and shouted at the Poles: ‘Look, fascists, what you are doing!’ Once they brought logs and shields and forced the men to storm the fence. They threw stones at the Poles, hiding behind our backs.”
On the fifth day, F.A.’s daughter developed a high fever. She was unconscious. F.A. crawled to the Belarusian guards, holding his daughter, begging for help, for a doctor. “Get lost!” a soldier shouted and kicked him in the chest.
On the eighth day, having lost all hope, F.A. saw a group of volunteers on the Polish side. He broke through the fence and surrendered to them. His daughter was immediately hospitalized in a Polish hospital with severe pneumonia and hypothermia. “I realized we were not clients. We were weapons,” he said in the refugee center. “They bought us in Iraq, brought us here, and used us like bullets to shoot at Europe. They did not see us as human beings. To them, we were just a ‘human shield’.”
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