I thought those were procedures so that they could take me to the camp – Jean’s pushback

During an interview in January 2025, Jean from the Central African Republic describes one of three pushbacks she experienced. The described event took place in August 2024 (five months earlier). After crossing the border, she spent two days in the forest, without a phone, food, or water. She couldn’t walk after the Belarusian officers forced her to cross the border wall:

(…) I wasn’t able to walk and I was barely able to stand up, because I had been thrown into Poland by force by soldiers on the other side and I had spent two days in the forest without a phone, without food and without water.

She asked for help from passers-by (two men), who called the border guard. Two border guard officers (a man and a woman), whom she identified by their uniforms, detained her and took her to a border guard station. She spent one day there, and was given food and water. According to the report, her phone was destroyed during the time she spent in detention. Jean explains that she did not request international protection as she did not know what it was. But she begged the officers not to take her to Belarus, saying that she had experienced sexual violence in the forest:

I didn’t demand asylum because I didn’t know what asylum was, I did tell them I can’t go back into the forest because I’ve suffered from sexual violence in the forest, I begged them not to send me back to the forest.

In response, the guards asked her how she got to Poland. According to her account, she received documents but without explanation. She signed them thinking she would be sent to a refugee camp:

Yes, they gave me documents I didn’t understand at all and just told me to sign and I thought those were procedures so that they could take me to the [refugee] camps and I signed.

Jean was handcuffed and pushed across the border at night, near border post 417, in the marshy area east of the Siemianówka Reservoir. Before the pushback, the handcuffs were removed from one hand:

They took them off only on one side, I had to manage in the forest to take off the other side.

The guards who pushed her out wore uniforms and balaclavas:

People that push back are from the military, they are dressed in uniforms and wear balaclavas to hide their faces and we were handcuffed and thrown in the back of the car so anyway, there was no way to know more.