International scandal sparks off around construction of fence on Polish-Belarusian border

3 февраля 2022
An international scandal broke out around the construction of a fence on the Polish-Belarusian border. The Duda-Morawiecki regime has started to build a large-scale reinforcement of its borders. It is going to be 5 meters in height and stretch for 60 kilometers through the forests of Belovezhskaya Pushcha.

To be more exact, it will cut the forest in two parts like a knife. It will not only endanger rare animal species, such as European bison, lynxes, and bears, but it will also destroy the unique forests. This is the only remaining primeval forest in Europe. The State Control Committee of Belovezhskaya Pushcha is now carrying out a check-up on the issues of preservation and development of Belovezhskaya Pushcha. UNESCO and the World Wildlife Fund have expressed their concern. Also more than 700 foreign scientists sent a petition to the European Commission.

The silence of the forest is punctuated by the sounds of machinery: the crack of a fallen tree as a cry for help. A large-scale construction project is underway on the Belarusian-Polish border.  The Construction workers are accompanied by border guards and several police buses. There are mountains of sand and metal constructions around - it all looks scary. But the fortification, which is now being erected, is much more dangerous. It is five meters high and 60 kilometers long all over Belovezhskaya Pushcha Forest: even the Berlin Wall was smaller. This is how the Polish side is fortifying its lines. The fence is going to cut the very heart of Belovezhskaya Pushcha in two parts. The consequences of such a division are sad. Last year the Poles have already built a barbed wire fence in the forest. The animals that used to migrate from the Polish to the Belarusian side, got trapped. One of the bison died in agony. While trying to return to Poland, it ran into an obstacle and got stuck in the swamp. A similar fate now awaits the entire herd of animals. The giants want to get home, but they can't. According to some estimates, there are 19 bison stuck in this area. To keep the animals from starving, the Belarusians feed them.

Belovezhskaya Pushcha is the last large area of primeval forest in Europe. Thanks to the protection, it has survived in its natural state till nowadays. For centuries, the forest lived as a single organism. The border line was marked in 1944. Until recently, it did not interfere with free movement of animals. The barbed wall is going to isolate groups of animals from each other. This threatens to impoverish the gene pool of, for example, the bison, which is already a genetically vulnerable species. The European bison population in the world has been restored from just a few animals. And the genetic diversity of this population is extremely low. The division of the Belovezhskaya Pushcha Forest with a fence is going to lead to even less genetic diversity.

The construction at the border may turn into a natural disaster. The populations of lynxes, bears, and other species, for the preservation of which the environmentalists have been fighting for decades, are also at risk of extinction. Experts say that the artificial barrier will cause irreparable damage to the entire forest. Changing the water balance will lead to the death of valuable old-growth trees and the loss of a number of wetlands. They are vital for rare bird species, which could disappear forever as a species.

Dmitry Grummo, deputy director for scientific work at the Institute of Experimental Botany of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus:

“Any linear infrastructure leads to local disasters, which we cannot predict, but they certainly will be, given the significant swampy part of the park, the formation of dams of artificial type. They can also lead to waterlogging, violations of the hydrological regime, shallowing of rivers. We may say that this experiment is very dangerous.”

Belovezhskaya Pushcha is included into the UNESCO World Heritage List as a transboundary site. This international organization and the World Wildlife Fund have expressed their concern about the construction on the border.