Enlarge image
Svetlana Alexievich: Appeal to the EU
Photo: Christoph Soeder / picture alliance / dpa / Pool
“Let's not take our eyes off the tragedy!” Reads the open letter from the writers Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller, Swetlana Alexijewitsch and Olga Tokarczuk, which the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” published on Tuesday.
It is addressed to the President of the European Council Charles Michel, the President of the European Parliament David Sassoli and the Members of the European Parliament.
At the EU's external border between Poland and Belarus, the situation is currently worsening with thousands of stranded migrants.
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the UN Organization for Migration (IOM) were alarmed on Tuesday about the conditions in the border area.
"The Polish government has declared a state of emergency in the border strip between Poland and Belarus, on the basis of which it refused to help the sick and dying in the border zone to the doctors and paramedics and blocked the media from accessing the tragedy taking place there," write the four authors . »However, even the incomplete, fragmentary information gives an insight into the gigantic extent of the humanitarian catastrophe that is occurring on the border of the European Union. We know that there people are subjected to the ruthless procedure of pushbacks and are exposed to hunger, exhaustion and hypothermia in the swamps. "
The Nobel Prize winners in literature appealed to the EU institutions "to comply with the resolutions of the Geneva Refugee Convention and, in particular, to grant access to the asylum procedure to all who ask for it and are detained at the eastern EU border."
They called for "a broad-based diplomatic initiative in the countries of the Middle East to counteract the misleading narrative of the Belarusian regime, which aims to bring as many desperate refugees as possible to the Polish-Belarusian border (...)." Alexievich also shouted , Tokarczuk, Jelinek and Müller to allow "the aid organizations that could provide medical and legal aid into the border area."
cbu / dpa