She put pepper spray inside the water – Feras’s pushback

Before Feras managed to enter Polish territory, he made several attempts to cross the border. According to his words, he and his companions were pepper-sprayed several times (while still on Belarusian territory) by Polish services.

[…] polish border guards came and they used [peppe] spray even though we didn’t cross the border yet, we didn’t cross the steel [the wal]. […]

One of the times, the Polish services, having spotted the people on the other side of the fence, were to open the functional gate in the border barrier and move to the eastern side to severely beat the group there:

They came to the forbidden area.¹Forbidden area – a term used by people on their way to the border strip between Poland and Belarus. There was a gate, they opened the gate and they checked us and they found the ladder. We were trying to cross the border with a ladder. They took the ladder and they beat us a lot. And after that they went to the side of Poland and they closed a gate.

In the muharrama, Feras spent about three days. Other male and female officers of the Polish Border Guard also used violence against him and his companions, using pepper spray and flashbang grenades. One of the guards, during another patrol in an area adjacent to where the Syrian was staying, later allegedly sold cigarettes to people. The officer said that those who used violence against them “were not from his team”:

We were buying 10 cigarettes for 20 dollars. He was very kind and he said [niezrozumiałe, przyp. WAM] it was not his crew, it was another crew. The ladies, they were very violent and wild and they were treating us like we were not even human.

The situation with the entry of the border guards into the muharrama, according to Feras’ account, was repeated twice more. The second time again the officers managed to take away another ladder, but the third time was different:

And for the third time they tried to take it [the ladder], but we defended it with a lot of us. We were saying we have this woman with us and she was with 2 of her children. When we were trying to cross the border they were using plastic bullets²During the interview, it was clarified that these were rubber bullets. and we got a few plastic bullets, like they were using it on us. […] 

Asked if anyone in the group had been injured by the officers’ use of rubber bullet guns, Feras said:

We didn’t get injured too much but there were red points on our bodies. We were wearing a lot of clothes.

At one point, 10 people from the group, including the aforementioned woman and her two children, managed to cross the border with Feras. After crossing about four kilometres into the country, they were all stopped by Polish services:

They found us and they were beating us and spraying us at the same time. (…)  And they beat the lady, woman. They were trying to attack kids, but we didn’t let them. We were defending [them, przyp. WAM]. They were beating us because we were defending the kids and they used rubber bullets and they took us back to the border.

On the Belarusian side, the Syrian and his companions were taken by Belarusian services to the vicinity of one of the temporary camps where border guards there are supposed to detain people on the move:

We were beaten, but the beating was not as strong as Polish beating. They didn’t use pepper spray, rubber bullets or other kinds of violence.

Like other groups, Feras and his companions were not allowed to return to Minsk. While trying to get out of the muharrama, the group was ambushed by dogs, some of the people were bitten. Belarusian services transported Feras with the rest of the people again to the Polish border barrier. On the spot, exhausted and hungry, they asked the Polish officers on the other side of the wall for water and food:

They took us back to the forbidden area. (…) At that time we were so thirsty and hungry and we asked the Polish soldiers.. We asked them for a drink or a little food. And there was a woman, a soldier and she gave us a bottle of water and while we drinked it, we wished we did not drink that, but we already did, but before the children. We realized that she put pepper spray inside the water. After we drank it, me and another guy – our stomach got burned and it was so painful. And I swore at her in Russian a little bit in English and after that she swore at me in a lot of languages, like all of the languages she knew she was swearing at me. We decided to go back to the Belarusian border point that we were trying to cross to go back to Mińsk.