Granted, I can't speak for every relationship out there. We make excuses to stick around because it feels good to have someone around, no matter how absent the person is when you're together.īut here’s what we’ve really done: We have created the damaging illusion that, whatever happens, the relationship was meant to last. We’re hopeful that it will transform into something more. We allow our emotions to cloud our judgment. Why do we stay in these less than fulfilling, dead-end relationships? It’s pretty simple, actually. Whether it started out as a seemingly good relationship, friendship or perhaps even a random hookup, holding out for someone who doesn’t seem interested in a future with you might mean it's time to reevaluate yours. When I say limbo land, I’m referring to a stagnant relationship that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere other than backwards. Yet, even though we tell others to get out, it’s not so easy to take the same advice when your own emotions are personally invested. This is a human crisis, and those who are trapped in it desperately need a humane and mature response.We’ve all witnessed this situation at some point before, either personally or from afar. For its part, Belarus should immediately halt its abuse against migrants, facilitate humanitarian access to those on the border and allow those who wish to leave the border zone and return home to do so. Poland should also halt unlawful pushbacks of migrants to Belarus, where they will face inhuman and degrading treatment, and instead allow them access to its asylum procedure and decent reception conditions. To prevent further deaths, the EU and its member states need to work with Poland to immediately ensure humanitarian access to border areas, currently off-limits to those who can help. While the European Union and its member states are focused on war talk, states of emergency, and barbed wire fences, the acute suffering of the women, men, and children trapped in limbo at the border is being ignored. In the meanwhile, a humanitarian crisis is taking root on the border, with at least eight documented deaths and hundreds, if not thousands of people either trapped in inhuman conditions in Belarus or its border zone, or stranded in the woods in Poland and having to walk through swamps, marshlands and difficult forest terrain. I spent two weeks on the ground in October, one in Belarus the other in Poland, documenting accounts from migrants of abuses on both sides of the border. They told me how Belarusian border guards pushed them – exhausted and abused – to try again to enter Poland, in most cases unsuccessfully, resulting only in their forced return to Belarus and further abuse. Migrants described the Belarussian border as a place of brute violence, where they were forcibly kept in open spaces without shelter, food, or water for days to weeks, vulnerable to theft and other abuse, and blocked from returning to Minsk or their home countries. He ended up, as many have, back on the Belarus side, a place many migrants described as pure hell. He told me he had been pushed back from the Polish side of the border several times, sometimes violently and that his pleas for asylum were ignored by Polish border guards. This was the “choice” that a Kurdish man from Syria told me a Belarusian border guard had given him, as he described his horrific experiences on the Poland-Belarus border, pleading with the guard to be allowed go back to the capital, Minsk. Senior Researcher, Eastern Europe and Western Balkans
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