WARSAW, Poland — Thousands marched in Warsaw on Thursday to mark Poland’s Independence Day, led by far-right groups calling for strong borders, while its troops blocked hundreds of new attempts by migrants to enter the country illegally from neighboring Belarus in a tense standoff.
Security forces patrolled the capital for the parade, which was peaceful, unlike those in recent years that have seen violence by some extremists.
“Today there are not only internal disputes. Today there are also external disputes. Today there is an attack on the Polish border,” march leader Robert Bakiewicz said in a speech, adding that all Poles should support those who are protecting the eastern frontier.
The march was overshadowed by events unfolding along Poland’s border with Belarus, where thousands of riot police, troops and border guards are turning back migrants, many from the Middle East, who are trying to enter the European Union. Makeshift camps have sprung up in forests on the Belarusian side near a crossing at the Polish town of Kuznica, and with temperatures falling and access to the frontier restricted, there are fears of a humanitarian crisis.
EU officials have accused Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko of using the migrants as pawns in a “hybrid attack” to retaliate for sanctions imposed on his authoritarian regime for a harsh internal crackdown on dissent.
With the EU weighing more sanctions on Belarus, Lukashenko threatened to cut off Russian natural gas supplies to Europe that pass through a pipeline in his country. “I would recommend the Poles, Lithuanians and other brainless people to think before they talk,” he said.
The U.N. Security Council discussed the crisis privately but took no action, though six of its Western members condemned the use “of human beings whose lives and well-being have been put in danger for political purposes by Belarus” and called on the international community “to hold Belarus accountable” and “to stop these inhumane actions.”
Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Dmitry Polyansky, called the EU members’ decision to raise the Belarus-Poland issue in the U.N.’s most powerful body “a total shame.” He said Belarus is not to blame that people who came legally to Belarus want to enter EU countries.
Courts and Warsaw’s liberal Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski had banned the Independence Day march, which celebrates Poland’s statehood, but right-wing authorities in the national government overrode the order and gave the gathering the status of a state ceremony.
The government’s support for the far-right leaders of the march underlined how Poland’s right-wing ruling party wants their backing. It also is engaged in a political fight with the EU over changes to Poland’s judiciary, seen in Brussels as an erosion of democratic norms, along with rhetoric viewed as discriminatory to LGBT groups.
In 2017, the parade drew tens of thousands and featured white nationalist and antisemitic slogans. The next year, the president, prime minister and other leaders marched the same route as the nationalists.
In seeking to ban the march, Trzaskowski argued that Warsaw, which was razed by Nazi Germany in World War II, is no place for “fascist slogans.”