Train station, Brest, Belarus, December 7, 2016. (c) Yulia Gorbunova, Human Rights Watch.While Europe has been focusing its attention on refugee flows across the Mediterranean, another refugee situation has been building on the Belarus-Poland border. Since late 2015, thousands of asylum seekers, mostly from Russia’s North Caucasus republics of Ingushetia, Dagestan and especially Chechnya, have arrived here, hoping to cross the border into Poland and seek safety.
With the Kremlin’s blessing, Ramzan Kadyrov has been running Chechnya for close to a decade as his own fiefdom, eradicating all forms of dissent. Abduction-style detentions, enforced disappearances and torture are rampant. Russian law and human rights protections exist only on paper; Kadyrov’s orders determine the rules applicable to Chechnya’s daily life.
At the Brest train station in December we spoke to “Tamara”, a Chechen woman in her late forties. She had arrived in Brest, a historic Belarusian city on the Polish border, four months earlier. She had been trying unsuccessfully to cross into Poland ever since, and when her money ran out, she and her three sons slept at the train station for several nights.
