Three people have been detained by police after a video emerged of a group verbally abusing and threatening people from Ukraine and Belarus in a Warsaw park. If convicted, they could face up to five years in prison.
The incident has caused outrage in Poland, where the public have been overwhelmingly welcoming towards refugees from Ukraine, over a million of whom are estimated to be in the country.
The video, which was recorded by one of those abused, shows them being told to “get the f*** out of Poland!” and that they “can’t sit here as it’s a Polish bench, there are no Ukrainian ones”.
“Do you want to get beaten up?” a female voice is heard saying, adding that the men who had been threatening the group are “at home here” while the foreigners “are guests in Poland”.
The Racist and Xenophobic Behaviour Monitoring Centre (OMZRiK), an NGO, reported the incident to police on Friday and praised the authorities for detaining the first alleged perpetrator just two hours later. Two more people were detained on Saturday.
Świetna współpraca ze stołeczną policją!
Grupa kiboli z w-wy zaatakowała na boisku ukraińską, białoruską i polską młodzież z pobudek ksenofobicznych.
O 14:00 złożyliśmy zawiadomienie o popełnieniu przestępstwa. O godzinie 16:00 policja już zatrzymała pierwszego ze sprawców. pic.twitter.com/s26x7SPz9l
— Ośrodek Monitorowania Zachowań Rasistowskich (@OmzRi) September 2, 2022
Rafał Markiewicz, spokesman for Warsaw police, confirmed to TVN24 that the three – two men and one woman – had been detained and were awaiting indictment by prosecutors.
Under article 119 of Poland’s penal code, anyone who “commits violence or makes illegal threats against a group or an individual due to their national, ethnic, racial, political or religious affiliation” can face imprisonment of between three months and five years.
News website Wirtualna Polska talked to the author of the recording, Alieksieji, a dissident who fled Belarus about a year ago and was granted a humanitarian visa in Poland, where he now lives and works in Warsaw.
He explained that he and a group of friends come to the spot every two weeks to play football. This time when they arrived a group of children were playing on the pitch.
After Alieksieji’s group offered to play with them, the children went away. Soon afterwards, an aggressive man came over, making accusations that they had not allowed the children to play. That’s when Alieksiej started recording.
“We didn’t want any confrontation, we had no idea what it was all about,” he told Wirtualna Polska, adding that it was the first such attack he has experienced in Poland. “We are very grateful for the warm welcome in Poland. Poles are an amazing nation.”
Recent official data show that the number of Belarusians in Poland has passed 50,000, more than twice as many as there were in 2020, when Minsk began a crackdown on protests against President Alexander Lukashenko’s claimed election victory.
Meanwhile, around three million Ukrainians are estimated to live in Poland (7-8% of the county’s population), made up of both refugees who have fled Russia’s invasion this year and previous immigrants.
Opinion polls show that the overwhelming majority of Poles have welcomed refugees. But a vocal minority, including the far-right Confederation (Konfederacja) party, have been criticising what they say are “priveleges” granted to Ukrainians and promoting a hashtag #StopTheUkrainisationOfPoland, which has been trending recently.
Main image credit: OMZRiK/Twitter
Agnieszka Wądołowska is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She has previously worked for Gazeta.pl and Tokfm.pl and contributed to Gazeta Wyborcza, Wysokie Obcasy, Duży Format, Midrasz and Kultura Liberalna
