Many NGOs say that a mass humanitarian crisis has unfolded, with countless men, women and children without food, shelter or warmth. Professor Matthew Longo, a political scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said that Lukasheko is doing nothing new - using Belarus' border as a weapon against the EU. He said that history is full of states using their borders as a way of pressuring their enemies, often allowing migrant populations to pass through their countries in order to reach the next. He said that Europe could soon face something similar, having studied cartels in Mexico.
Along Mexico's northern border with the USA, cartels have reaped major profits from smuggled migrants from Central and Southern America, as well as the rest of the world, into North America. A similar scenario has been heard of the migrant crisis in Europe, where desperate people pay huge amounts of money to enter countries like the UK, only to be met by a small rubber dinghy on the banks of the Mediterranean, which is often sold to tens of others, making for cramped and dangerous journeys. Prof Longo noted that operations in Europe were nowhere near as organized as Mexico's cartels. He said that it would not surprise him if EU buffer states - countries in North Africa and Eastern Europe, former Soviet states - formed organised cartels of their own and held Brussels to ransom. Prof Longo told Express.co.uk that he was talking about Lukashenko's use of his border with the EU. uk: I think that once the border became so easy to blackmail, once the EU became this place that puts so much political cache on stopping people from getting in, it becomes a space that people on the outside will look to exploit and be provocative. JUST IN: Laura Kuensberg explodes at Boris over new Covid rules.
I don't see why this wouldn't become the norm, because insofar as this is just a Lukashenko power play. You've already had it in the US-Mexico borderlands, where it wasn't governments but cartels. A cartel in Sinaloa runs the resources, it runs the distribution of wealth, and it has all the arms and police and state bought out. The idea that you could use or levy the power of the border for concessions against big powers is not remotely new. We don't know it yet in the European context. He went on to note that human smuggling in Mexico is often carried out by those with great power, something that is not the case in Europe. He said that it wouldn't surprise anyone looking ten years down the road if they saw the cartelisation of all these European buffer states. All these states realize that the EU is extortable, and so the EU is in a tough place, because once it has politicised its borders as much as it has, it finds itself in a particularly bad place. It wouldn't surprise me if, especially in one of these more power vacuum countries like Libya, if you start to see a non-state border power like a cartel form, that's as powerful. In recent years, German press launches extraordinary Brexit attack REPORT Brexit snub as the EU leaves Britain out of Horizon initiative INSIGHT Boris warned that ANALYSIS Cartels in Mexico have played an increasing role in the surge of migrants in the Mexico-US border crisis. Experts say they make big profits helping smuggle people across the country, with profits comprising a significant and growing portion of their riches. Similar operations have been found in Europe. In the last month, Spanish police broke up a gang that smuggled hundreds of migrants across the Balkans and into the EU. Police from nine countries were involved in the operation. The network has smuggled at least 400 Pakistanis into the EU in the last eight months, cramming them into the back of trucks and charging them up to €20,000 17,000 each for the journey. Each truck carried more than 50 people in a space the size of eight square metres.
The payment network, which operates largely without an easily traceable paper trail, helps smugglers disguise transactions from authorities and avoids the risks of taking cash across borders. Migrants say they like not to carry large amounts of cash and that this mode of payment reduces the risk of being robbed or swindled. At the Belarus-Poland border, migrant crossings have decreased, but tensions between powers remain. Lithuania has extended a state of emergency at its border with Belarus and at camps for migrants who arrived from there until January 15, 2022. The emergency allows border guards to use mental coercion and proportional physical violence to prevent migrants from entering Lithuania.