16 NEWS Best columns: Europe
CZECH REPUBLIC
A fourth wave of the coronavirus is rolling across
the Czech Republic, said Petr Honzejk, and we
have no one to blame but ourselves. “Dozens of
people are dying” every day, and we’re recording
more than 9,000 new Covid-19 infections daily—
double the number at the start of November. The
vast majority of these cases and deaths are, of
course, among the unvaccinated. And we have far
too many of those. Like other former Communist
countries in Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic
has plateaued in vaccinations, with some 58 per-
cent of people fully inoculated. That’s a good 10
to 20 percentage points lower than most Wes tern
Euro pean nations. The culprit is “the conceptof freedom that still prevails in many post-
Communist societies.” The Communist regime
“constantly interfered with people’s lives down
to the smallest detail,” telling us what to study,
what to think, what music to listen to, where to
travel. Freedom, for us, means “I do what I want,
and no one can tell me otherwise.” So, when
our democratically elected government tells us to
roll up our sleeves and get a shot, we bristle and
refuse. One not atypical Prague pub has a sign
outside proclaiming that all are welcome, vaxxed
and unvaxxed alike. This “vulgar idea of free-
dom” may be very Czech, but it’s also childish.
And it is killing us.Kids today just can’t understand their parents’
fondness for the once ubiquitous red telephone
booth, said Tom Utley. Nearly all Britons now
own a cellphone—90 percent of children have
one by age 11—so youngsters find it utterly be-
musing that us olds used to wait in line at public
call boxes, hunting around in our pockets for
coins. “Call volumes from pay phones have plum-
meted,” from 800 million minutes in 2002 to only
7 million in 2020. But the British phone box re-
mains a simply gorgeous example of urban design,
and that’s why campaigners across the country are
“battling so fiercely to save these relics of a pastage from the scrap heap.” Government regulators
said last week that 5,000 of the 21,000 remain-
ing red boxes would be maintained as public pay
phones, particularly in rural areas where cellphone
reception is spotty and along highways with high
rates of accidents. Telecoms firm BT is offering to
sell many of the rest to community organizations
for the token sum of 1 pound each, about $1.35.
Some villages are now using the booths to house
defibrillators for public use; others as little free
libraries; still others as art galleries. Let’s “keep
those ideas coming—and save as many of these
icons as we can.”Re
utersPresident Alexander Lukashenko is “wea-
ponizing vulnerable people” out of spite,
said The Guardian (U.K.) in an editorial.
The Belarusian dictator was infuriated
when the European Union slapped sanc-
tions on his regime last year, after he
rigged his re-election and cracked down
brutally on pro-democracy protesters.
“In retaliation,” Lukashenko began issu-
ing tourist visas to people in Africa and
the Middle East, flying them to Minsk
and then busing them to the borders of
EU members Poland, Latvia, and Lithu-
ania. There, Belarusian security forces
tell the migrants to enter the EU and seek
asylum, even handing them wire cutters to slice through border
fences. “Lukashenko’s actions are cynical and despicable.” Thou-
sands of migrants— including children and the elderly—are now
trapped at the border zone in freezing conditions with no food
or shelter. “Yet Poland is treating the arrival of these desperate
people not as a humanitarian crisis but an invasion.” It has sent
thousands of troops to the border and, in violation of EU law, is
expelling any migrants that enter its territory. Poland’s nationalist
government now plans “a Trump-style border wall” and is fan-
ning anti- migrant and anti-EU sentiment to benefit itself politically.Poland should have been prepared for this crisis, said Slawomir
Sierakowski in Wiadomosci.onet.pl (Poland). It was obvious in
early summer, when Lukashenko began dumping migrants on
Lithuania’s doorstep, that we would be next. But Poland’s rul-
ing Law and Justice party was squabbling with EU officials who
had condemned its attacks on the independence of Polish courts,and it refused to ask the bloc for help.
Now our troops are standing “several
dozen yards away from Belarusian sol-
diers,” who we know “are in love with
violence.” The smallest misstep could
spark a bloody conflict. Yet we can’t
count on support from our NATO al-
lies, because our government has alien-
ated them with its ugly behavior. Rus-
sian President Vladimir Putin is the real
mastermind of this crisis, said Stefan
Kornelius in Süddeutsche Zeitung
( Germany). He is using Lukashenko as
his puppet to accom plish a long-term
goal: destabilizing the EU. During the
last migrant crisis, in 2015, Germany pressured other EU nations
to accept hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, causing a
populist, anti- immigrant backlash across the Continent. Putin is
banking on Germany being just as welcoming this time around.But Putin and Lukashenko will also benefit if we shun these
migrants, said Peter Wolodarski in Dagens Nyheter (Sweden).
The dictators want to show “that the Western world lacks the
morals that they themselves don’t care about.” So long as the
EU treats this as a border issue, not a humanitarian disaster, we
are giving Putin the optics he wants. Please help us, said Syrian
refugee Nidal Ibrahim in AlJazeera.com (Qatar). I’m a former
schoolteacher and I’ve been trapped at the Polish border since
Oct. 5. While my wife and three children are waiting in Turkey,
my friend Muhammad’s four children are with us, hungry and
freezing. I have seen other asylum seekers perish from starvation,
thirst, and cold. “Either someone takes pity on us, or we die.”Why we
ignore
our leaders
Petr Honzejk
Hospodarske Noviny
UNITED KINGDOM
Migrants blocked from entering PolandNew uses for
our famous
phone booths
Tom Utley
Daily Mail
Belarus: Cynically funneling migrants toward the EU