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A Muslim burial for a migrant whose life ended near the Poland-Belarus border

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BOHONIKI, Poland -

The first thing you notice when you drive into the tiny Polish village of Bohoniki is the mosque. It’s a wooden building, quite humble, with a small minaret crowning the shingled roof.

About a hundred people live in Bohoniki, with links to Islam that go back 600 years. They are known as the Tatars of Poland, who somehow managed to resist religious assimilation and the overwhelming domination of the Roman Catholic Church.

It’s not very far from the village to Poland’s troubled border with Belarus. As hundreds of migrants tried to sneak or force their way into Europe, held back by walls of razor wire and soldiers in battle dress, the Tatars of Bohoniki took on a tragic and solemn duty.

They began to bury some of the dozen or more who died on the way.

“Our tradition says Muslims must be buried in a Muslim cemetery,” one of the villagers told me. We were standing in front of a freshly-dug grave. The earth is sandy-coloured.

“Personally, I feel sadness. All Muslims are brothers, it doesn’t matter where they come from.”

The village cemetery sits on a tree-covered hillside, surrounded by plowed fields. It’s a peaceful setting, and faithfully looked after.

The first migrant they buried was a 19-year-old Syrian, Ahmed al-Hassan, who drowned crossing the river Bug. His grieving family watched the burial over a video link from thousands of kilometres away.

The second victim appeared to be African, about 30 years old. He died from exposure. That’s all the villagers knew about him. He went into Polish ground without a name.

“He left his home country for a better life,” said one of the men who carried the coffin, “and the worst thing happened to him here in Poland.”

European leaders point fingers shaking with contempt at the man they hold responsible for engineering this border crisis, the burly, crude, belligerent, and perhaps murderous strongman of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko.

With the brutal trademark of being “Europe’s last dictator,” he is surely a candidate for prosecution at the International Criminal Court. Wanted: For rigging the 2020 Belarus presidential election, then arresting and torturing hundreds of his political opponents.

It was after Europe imposed sanctions on Belarus that Lukashenko seized on the cruelty—or to his mind, the opportunity—of using migrants for retaliation.

Thousands of people from the Middle East were welcomed with visas, herded to the border with Poland, and then held there in a freezing stranglehold—with the dream of a new life in Europe just a few impossible steps away.

For his part, Lukashenko was merely exploiting Europe’s greatest weakness: how to seal off the continent from another crisis of mass migration, like the arrival of a million war-ravaged Syrians in 2015.

Even as Poland turned water cannons against the migrants, even as it lined up a small army of security forces along the border, even as it sent back those who did manage to cross—through all of it, Europe remained steadfast in solidarity.

Nor is it the first time migrants have been used as bargaining chips. Libya once threatened to unleash an “influx of starving and ignorant Africans” on Europe. Today, Europe helps finance the Libyan Coast Guard.

In 2016, Turkey was paid billions of dollars to keep migrants from reaching European shores. In effect, it was protection money. And what happened when Europe tried to punish Turkey over human rights abuses? Turkey threatened to scuttle the deal.

No surprise then that the autocratic leader of Belarus would seek to "weaponize" poor migrants, and send them into battle against his political enemies.

Which is how a nameless man, from an unknown country, came to be given a Muslim burial in a small village in Poland.

After his grave was covered in a mound of earth, villagers circled it with a fringe of stones and lay tree branches on top.

“It pains me,” said the imam, as he prayed for the man’s journey to paradise. 

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