![]() ![]() The Playboy letter in particular was not well-received, prompting some female Democratic politicians to withhold an endorsement.įranken consistently tied Coleman, a moderate, to President Bush during his campaign, producing ads that focused on the two campaigning together and Colemans votes with Bush.įranken tried to paint himself as the heir to Wellstone. Paul Wellstones (D) seat after he was killed in a plane crash in 2002.ĭespite a past littered with satirical rants, a letter to Playboy magazine, nearly two decades working for a show that lampooned presidential politics, and little experience, Franken is in a battle with two former Senators. This is a human crisis, and those who are trapped in it desperately need a humane and mature response.Barkley was briefly appointed to take over former Sen. For its part, Belarus should immediately halt its abuse against migrants, facilitate humanitarian access to those on the border and allow those who wish to leave the border zone and return home to do so. Poland should also halt unlawful pushbacks of migrants to Belarus, where they will face inhuman and degrading treatment, and instead allow them access to its asylum procedure and decent reception conditions. To prevent further deaths, the EU and its member states need to work with Poland to immediately ensure humanitarian access to border areas, currently off-limits to those who can help. While the European Union and its member states are focused on war talk, states of emergency, and barbed wire fences, the acute suffering of the women, men, and children trapped in limbo at the border is being ignored. In the meanwhile, a humanitarian crisis is taking root on the border, with at least eight documented deaths and hundreds, if not thousands of people either trapped in inhuman conditions in Belarus or its border zone, or stranded in the woods in Poland and having to walk through swamps, marshlands and difficult forest terrain. I spent two weeks on the ground in October, one in Belarus the other in Poland, documenting accounts from migrants of abuses on both sides of the border. They told me how Belarusian border guards pushed them – exhausted and abused – to try again to enter Poland, in most cases unsuccessfully, resulting only in their forced return to Belarus and further abuse. Migrants described the Belarussian border as a place of brute violence, where they were forcibly kept in open spaces without shelter, food, or water for days to weeks, vulnerable to theft and other abuse, and blocked from returning to Minsk or their home countries. ![]() He ended up, as many have, back on the Belarus side, a place many migrants described as pure hell. ![]() He told me he had been pushed back from the Polish side of the border several times, sometimes violently and that his pleas for asylum were ignored by Polish border guards. ![]() This was the “choice” that a Kurdish man from Syria told me a Belarusian border guard had given him, as he described his horrific experiences on the Poland-Belarus border, pleading with the guard to be allowed go back to the capital, Minsk. Senior Researcher, Eastern Europe and Western Balkans
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