[War & Business] Refugee Pushbacks

On the 15th (local time), Polish soldiers controlling illegal entry of Middle Eastern refugees in the border area with Belarus around Kuznica in eastern Poland. Kuznica (Poland) = Photo by Reuters and Yonhap News

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyunwoo Lee] Recently, Poland and Belarus in Eastern Europe have been engaged in a conflict over so-called ‘refugee pushbacks,’ where Middle Eastern refugees are being pushed toward each other's borders, drawing worldwide condemnation. Critics argue that the most inhumane acts are occurring in Europe, a region that has emphasized humanitarianism.

This refugee pushback began when Belarus, in retaliation against European Union (EU) sanctions, forced tens of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan toward the Polish border. With already strong anti-Islamic sentiment and far-right governments in power, Poland and other Eastern European countries have significantly increased border security forces and even demanded EU financial support for border wall construction.

In fact, such refugee pushbacks have been practiced in Eastern Europe since the medieval era, known as the ‘population pressure’ tactic. This strategy involves deliberately sending a massive number of refugees into the neighboring country’s territory to saturate the population capacity and reduce food supplies, thereby causing internal collapse.

This population pressure tactic was used by the Ottoman Turk Empire, the predecessor state of modern Turkey, during its invasion of Eastern Europe in the 16th century. After conquering the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire led refugees to invade Eastern Europe. At that time, the entire Balkan Peninsula, as well as parts of Hungary, Austria, and southern Poland, were invaded, and these historical memories have persisted as ‘Islamophobia.’

After the 2011 Middle Eastern democratization protests known as the ‘Arab Spring,’ refugees began flooding into Eastern Europe again, reviving Islamophobia. Eastern Europe, still struggling with chronic economic difficulties since the collapse of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, lacks the capacity to accommodate Middle Eastern refugees, which has intensified anti-Islamic sentiment among its people.

In this situation, the ‘Not In My Backyard (NIMBY)’ phenomenon in Western European countries worsened the problem. Western European countries have used EU subsidies paid to Eastern European countries as leverage to urge them to expand refugee acceptance, while pressuring them to reduce the number of refugees crossing into Western Europe, deepening the East-West divide within the EU.

The complex refugee pushback issue unfolding in Europe is not something that can be viewed as someone else’s problem. If a sudden crisis occurs in the precarious North Korean regime, millions of defectors could flood in just like the Middle Eastern refugees.

While the current annual number of North Korean defectors is in the hundreds, if millions were to arrive all at once, South Korea would inevitably face tremendous population pressure. It is time to consider how to address the various diplomatic issues and enormous budgetary challenges that may arise in the future, but the government seems to be focusing only on the urgent issue of a peace declaration.