Sienos Grupė

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivion” Milan Kundera, 1971.

Since 2021, the Sienos Grupė has been fighting to ensure basic rights for people on the move in Lithuania. In 2024, more than ever before, we spent time and energy in another fight - to preserve the memory of the ongoing so called “migration crisis”, amid strong tendencies to forget and ignore it.

2023 was not the first year that people came to Lithuania‘s borders in search of safety. However, 2023 was the first year that the Sienos Grupė functioned as an officially registered non-governmental non-profit organization for a whole year.

In 2023, the migration routes turned north, through Latvia, so we spent less time in Lithuanian forests. Wading through wetlands has been replaced by equally viscous wading through legislative processes. Confrontations with officials at check-points have been replaced by confrontation in courts, trying, via strategic litigation, to patch up the flaws in Lithuania‘s migration and asylum policies.

Sometimes humanitarian aid turned into a search for missing people. Sometimes the search for a missing person turned into the identification and burial of remains. Cemetery maintenance and a video call from a distant country to the cold Lithuanian land for the prayers of loved ones - we hardly expected such missions when we set up this helpline.

Eventually we realised that the undocumented people were being abandoned not only in our forests but also in our cities. Routine things like job search, medical care, legal services, banking bills - for some of them are difficult thresholds to cross, and we are trying to help.

We used to meet to celebrate holidays, taste each other‘s traditional food, enjoy newborn babies, learn Lithuanian and just smile at those fragile moments when everything is fine.

Our motto has remained the same since 2021: „We dream to be no longer needed“... But for now - we invite you to read about Sienos Grupė‘s year 2023 in our first activity report.

report is currently in production

In the summer of 2021, when the humanitarian crisis began on the Lithuanian-Belarusian border, people who later formed “Sienos Grupė”, observed the development of crisis with anxiety. Anxiety grew even more on August 3, 2021, with the introduction of pushbacks. Realizing the flow of people at the border and the fact that they were not ready to be “stuck” in the forest for a long time, it was possible to sense that the border was becoming a place of human rights violations and suffering. At that time, we began to communicate with “Grupa Granica” - Polish activists who had been providing humanitarian assistance to people who had crossed the border for a long time. Their testimonies were shocking and reinforced the need to provide assistance. We understood that the phrase “The situation at the border has been stabilized” repeated by representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not correspond to reality.

Before starting to act ourselves, we tried to contact people working with migration processes, non-governmental organizations, lawyers. The answer was: “You can't do anything here.” We asked the State Border Force for permission to prepare humanitarian packets. They refused.