World

Paul Workman: A Muslim Burial on the Polish-Belarusian Border

LONDON, UK – The first thing you notice when you drive into the tiny Polish village of Bohoniki is the mosque. It was a rather modest, wooden building, with a small tower with a corrugated iron roof.

About a hundred people live in Bohoniki, with links to Islam dating back 600 years. Known as the Polish Tatars, they somehow managed to resist religious assimilation and the overwhelming domination of the Roman Catholic Church.

It’s not very far from the village to Poland’s troubled border with Belarus. As hundreds of migrants tried to sneak or enter Europe, thwarted by razor-wire fences and soldiers in combat gear, the Tatars of Bohoniki took on a tragic mission. and solemn.

They began to bury some of the dozens or more of those who had died along the way.

“Our tradition says that Muslims must be buried in a Muslim cemetery,” one villager told me. We are standing in front of a freshly dug grave. The soil is sandy.

“Personally, I feel sad. All Muslims are brothers, it doesn’t matter where they come from”.

The village cemetery is located on a tree-lined hillside, surrounded by plowed fields. It is a peaceful and well cared for setting.

The first migrant they buried was a 19-year-old Syrian youth, Ahmed al-Hassan, who drowned while crossing the Bug River. His grieving family watched the burial via video link thousands of kilometers away.

The second victim was an African, about 30 years old. He died of exposure. That was all the villagers knew about him. He entered Poland without a name.

“He left his hometown for a better life,” said one of the coffin-bearers, “and the worst thing happened to him here in Poland.”

European leaders point with disdain at the man they hold responsible for orchestrating this border crisis, the burly, crude, belligerent and perhaps murderous Belarusian man. , Alexander Lukashenko.

With the brutal label of “Europe’s last dictator”, he is certainly a candidate for prosecution at the International Criminal Court. Wanted: For rigging the 2020 Belarusian presidential election, then arresting and torturing hundreds of his political opponents.

After Europe imposed sanctions on Belarus, Lukashenko seized on the cruelty – or in his mind, the opportunity – to use migrants to retaliate.

Thousands of people from the Middle East were greeted on visas, dragged to the border with Poland, and then detained there in an icy squeeze — with dreams of a new life in Europe just a few miles away. few steps.

For his part, Lukashenko is just exploiting Europe’s greatest weakness: how to block the continent from another mass migration crisis, like the emergence of a million Syrians devastated by war in 2015.

Even as Poland turns its water cannon on the migrants, even as they line up a small security army along the border, even as they send back those who tried to get through — through it all, Europe remains steadfast in solidarity.

It is also not the first time that migrants have been used as a bargaining chip. Libya once threatened to unleash a “wave of starving and ignorant Africans” in Europe. Today, Europe financially supports the Libyan Coast Guard.

In 2016, Turkey was paid billions of dollars to prevent migrants from reaching European shores. In fact, it’s security money. And what happened when Europe tried to punish Turkey for human rights abuses? Turkey threatened to break the deal.

It should come as no surprise that Belarus’s autocratic leader will seek to “weaponize” poor migrants, and send them into battle against his political enemies.

That’s how an unknown man, from an unknown country, arrived for a Muslim burial in a small Polish village.

After his grave was covered with a mound, the villagers surrounded it with a ledge of stone and placed branches on top.

“It hurts me,” the emperor said as he prayed for the man’s journey to heaven.

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