This week, watching Green Border was hard. There is something so symbolic to the plight of refugees and asylum seekers to be found in those forests between Poland and Belarus. The forest feels inescapable, meandering back and forth. Barren. Border patrol from both nations using asylum seekers as pawns in a geopolitical border war, constantly pushed over, under, and through barbed wire fences. The forest, its leaves fallen, branches stabbing the cold feet of those seeking a better life, only succeeds at providing ambiguous cover for the racist atrocities committed onto refugee families.
A boy drowns. Mothers are beaten as they pay their last dollars for water, their way to their final asylum destination already paid for previously. Activists are jailed.
This film, although a dramatic and fiction, closely resembles and creates images akin to real experiences along the Poland Belarusian board during the refugee crisis.
One part of the film, though, I found myself struggling with was the postscript at the very end. The film states that during the first two weeks of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, that Poland welcomed almost two million Ukrainian refugees. This contrasts the refugee crisis dating back to 2014 that the postscript explains has lead to the untimely death of “about 30,000 people…crossing various European borders, at sea, on land, in forests.”
There are some implications I find myself struggling with in this created dichotomy. There is no doubt that the Polish Belarusian border war, which uses and abuses asylum seekers, is horrific and spurred by conflict between Poland, a member of the EU, and Belarus, an effective satellite nation for the Russians through the supranational union established by the Belarusian-Russian Union State. The film explores the racism of the Polish border patrol, referring to the refugees as “darkies.” The Ukrainian refugee crisis, though, appears to be minimized by the film makers as a war “in Ukraine” as opposed to an invasion of Ukraine with the goal of establishing increased sentimentality for refugees stuck in the “Green Border” without expedited treatment by the Polish. However, especially because of Poland’s geopolitical tensions with Russia, their accepting of millions of Ukrainian refugees has an element of geopolitical tactic to it beyond a racial construct: it is symbolic. There is a strategy by the Polish government, and by the European Union, to welcome Ukrainians. For one, Poland shares a border with Ukraine and is in the EU. The other European Union border nations with Hungary also accepted a large number of Ukrainian refugees: around 140,000 Ukrainians went to Hungary within two weeks of the invasion and within three months of the invasion, over 442,000 Ukrainians fled to Slovakia and 961,270 fled to Romania, the other two EU border nations. While Poland took the most Ukrainians by number, in proportion to the country’s population, Slovakia took in the second most with Czechia taking in the most.
Here, I view it important to contextualize that geopolitical relation, and quantitative data, can demonstrate a narrative. Two contrasting immigration stories out of the same nation do not make one more or less important, or grueling.
What is critical is to examine, with care, the brutality that all refugees are escaping; there is space for criticizing a government like Poland’s for not treating all asylum seekers equally, but the context of geopolitical conflicts should be referenced for context.
