Bulgarian border guards have been accused of pushing back and even beating illegal immigrants by open borders activists and others, but the Bulgarian authorities deny any abuses have taken place.
Diana Dimova, who heads the Bulgarian pro-migration group Mission Wings, has claimed that Bulgarian officials have been engaging in increasingly brutal “pushbacks” — that is, returning migrants across a border after they have crossed, which is illegal under European Union law.
“Since the beginning of last year we have been seeing very intensive and brutal pushbacks of people,” Dimove alleged, broadcaster France 24 reports.
The pro-migration activist is not the only one to level accusations of abuse against the Bulgarian authorities, with several migrants claiming to have been subjected to physical attacks by border guards in comments to news wire service AFP.
A Syrian, who claimed to be 16, stated that after Bulgarians had detained him and placed him and others into a fenced-off area “they divided us into Arabs and Afghans and started beating us up. They beat us with batons.”
Ali Husseini, a 20-year-old from Afghanistan, alleged that Bulgarian border agents had stripped, assaulted and robbed him last year, claiming the police “took us to the forest and took our clothes, including my money, iPad, and shoes… They then opened the fence and sent us to the other side, which was Turkey, one by one.”
Abuse allegations levelled at Bulgaria are not new, as last May the NGO Human Rights Watch made claims that border guards were using police dogs to force migrants back across the border to Turkey.
The European Union border agency Frontex, which has also been accused of participating in and covering up pushbacks in the past, also alleging pushbacks by the Bulgarians in internal reports, and claimed Frontex agents were deliberately kept away.
According to one Frontex official, they experienced “degrading language and racist vocabulary such as referring to migrants as ‘Taliban’ by some Bulgarian border guards.”
Bulgaria has rejected the abuse allegations and has reported seeing a surge of illegal attempts last year, stopping around 164,000 attempted crossings in 2022, up from 55,000 the prior year.
“Over the past year pressure on our border has increased sharply and… the actions of the migrants are becoming more and more aggressive,” Bulgaria’s President Rumen Radev recently said.
Greece, another European Union member-state bordering Turkey, has experienced similar violence, with migrants lighting fires and hurling missiles at Greek personnel along the land border between the two countries during mass attacks in 2020.
Some migrants were found to be carrying Turkish-made firearms, with the Greeks accusing the Turkish authorities of tearing down sections of border fence, arming migrants with tear gas, and even opening fire in the direction of Greek officers to aid the attempted crossings.
Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) also reported that Turkish agents had been seeded among the would-be migrants in order to incite riots at the border, with violence only dying down as a result of the Wuhan virus pandemic overtaking the border crisis as 2020 wore on.
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