September 27, 2021
Published by Democracy Seminar on September 21, 2021
Scholar highlight: Tomasz Kitlinski is a Polish political philosopher and activist. Previously, Kitlinski was a Fulbright scholar at The New School for Social Research, and currently, he is a fellow at New University in Exile Consortium and Academy in Exile at the Freie Universitaet Berlin.
In this essay, Kitlinski, along with his co-writers Izabela Wagner and Angus Reid, discuss the entrapment of 32 Afghan refugees by polish border guards in Usnarz Górny, a Polish village that shares borders with Belarus. As of September 1, 2021, Poland enacted a “state of emergency” along Polish-Belarus borders in an attempt to prevent the movements of Afghan migrants from entering Europe. The essay points to how the current emergency limits humanitarian aid workers from assisting the migrants and prohibits journalists from documenting the atrocities, leaving the 32 Afghan migrants extremely vulnerable to abuse, starvation, and mistreatment. This comes at a time when anti-immigrant sentiments are widespread within Europe.