EYE SPY
03-03-2004, 10:21 PM
Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
Poland's new role: European border guard
Richard Bernstein
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
DOROHUSK, Poland The message here at this gleaming new border post overlooking the thickly forested banks of the Bug River is that Poland is ready.
Inside a spotless weapons room is a rack of snub-nosed Glauberyt automatic pistols, a Polish version of the famous Uzi. There are 9-millimeter pistols in a closet, boxes of bullets, two submachine guns and green canvas kits marked "European Union" with the latest in night-vision goggles inside.
In the garage outside is a Land Rover, provided by the European Union, along with a posse of nimble red Honda XL motorcycles. Along the side of the building is a kennel where two dogs trained to follow tracks in the woods bark for attention. Not seen, but available to protect this stretch of the 525-kilometer, or 325-mile, border between Poland and Ukraine, are snowmobiles, a new helicopter and a light patrol plane, also donated by the EU.
"Of course, we understand that this will be the border of Western Europe," said Lieutenant Colonel Andrej Wojcik, commander of the newly strengthened Polish Border Guards in this area, giving a tour of the new post.
He introduces some of the 1,500 men and women under his command, shows them the new weapons and vehicles and even the very clean and secure lockup rooms where future captured illegal immigrants will be temporarily held.
Given its way, Poland would probably not be fortifying its eastern borders quite to this extent. The country is concerned about creating what some people here call a new Iron Curtain or a new Rio Grande between it and its former allies in the Soviet bloc, namely Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation, whose citizens, once able to cross into Poland by showing just their passports, now need visas, a requirement that, at least temporarily, has cut down on exchanges between Poland and the East.
But a tightly controlled, nearly impermeable border was one of many conditions that this country had to fulfill to gain EU membership, which it will receive on May 1 this year, along with nine other countries from Malta and Cyprus in the south to Estonia in the north.
"There was a belief that hordes of illegal migrants are waiting outside our borders and that our controls were inefficient," Jan Truszczynski, Poland's chief EU negotiator, said in an interview in Warsaw.
"We had to confront this type of thinking, that Poland's borders were more dangerous than other European borders," Truszczynski said, "which means that we had to beef up resources and investment along our eastern frontier."
There are several ways of considering what will be the new European border, not least of them using the grand perspective of history. The new eastern land border of Europe - Europe defined politically and economically by the soon-to-be-25-member EU - will be some 3,860 kilometers, running roughly northeast to southwest, essentially differentiating the "West" from the "East," Europe from the rest of the Eurasian continent.
"This is very moving," Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of Germany said in a recent interview, speaking in general of the shift of the European border several hundred kilometers to the east. "It's a historic moment. It will be the first time in modern history that Germany will be the center of Europe without direct threats to our border and without us threatening anybody."
Jerzy Holzer, director of the Institute for Politics of the Polish Academy of Science, put this idea from the Polish perspective: "Poland will no longer be between two big nations, Germany and Russia, which was always a dangerous situation, but in a union with many other nations who will be partners," he said.
"It's a new situation for all the Eastern countries."
In fact, as both Fischer and Holzer noted, the new arrangement is likely to bring new problems.
Indeed, the mood in Poland seems to be less one of unmitigated joy at the prospect of joining the rest of Europe and more a sense of gains measured against losses - gains with the West, losses with the East.
For the average Pole, and probably also for most members of the Polish government, the new borders are more a question of putting into effect the many regulations involved in joining Europe than a question of grand history.
In many ways the new arrangements on the borders, not just of Poland but of all the new EU member states, promise to be more complicated than before, rather than simpler.
Among 13 of the 15 older EU member states (Britain and Ireland are the exceptions), what are called the Schengen rules will prevail - Schengen being the town in Luxembourg where the agreement to eliminate border controls was made. The rules went into effect in 1995.
This means, for example, that once an outsider has arrived, legally or illegally, in, say, Germany, he or she can travel freely as far as Spain and Portugal, without ever having to display so much as a passport.
This freedom of movement, however, gave rise to the fear described by Truszczynski - that a Europe pressed up against the poorer and usually not solidly democratic states of the East will mean a sharp increase in illegal immigration, drugs and other contraband, and organized crime in the West.
And so there will be a transition period of probably several years during which the old borders between the old EU countries and the new ones will be streamlined but not eliminated.
For the foreseeable future, for example, a Polish citizen will be able to cross the border into Germany without a visa, merely by showing a passport or Polish national identity card. But there will still be a border post and Polish citizens will be allowed to stay for only a limited period, probably about three months.
According to German officials, a Pole who wanted to work in Germany would have to apply for a work permit and register with the local police once in Germany.
Worried about low-cost labor flooding in, the existing EU countries have announced restrictions on job seekers from the new states for several years.
In other words, there will remain what one German writer on the EU, Roland Freudenstein, has called "a frontier of poverty" - though it is a frontier, Freudenstein has written, with a good chance of disappearing.
In the meantime, much of the paraphernalia of borders and the long, slow lines of cars and trucks will continue to exist on such overland borders as that between Germany and the Czech Republic or Austria and Slovakia, even if the line for new EU members moves faster than before.
And then, there will be what Freudenstein has called the "Huntington border," for the political scientist Samuel Huntington's theory that the world will be divided into zones of sometimes warring civilizations.
This will be the new border between Europe and non-Europe, a long, jagged line cutting through what used to be the Soviet bloc. Along this border, controls and surveillance will not be loosened, but intensified, at least until that vague future date when countries like Ukraine and Belarus are also admitted into the European club.
Beyond that, there is the question of Russia, which is not a candidate for EU membership and has been unhappy about many aspects of the enlargement, from the spectacle of watching former satellites join the West to more stringent visa requirements. Lithuania's membership cuts Russia off from its westernmost region, Kaliningrad.
Among other demands, Russia wants unrestricted access for freight and military shipments across Lithuania to Kaliningrad; it seeks favored trading status with the EU and it wants a seat at the EU table of the ex officio sort it already enjoys at North Atlantic Treaty Organization. So far, the EU has been unwilling, drawing a line that seems to Russia to have all the qualities of a "Huntington border."
The line here in Dorohusk on the Bug River is clearly visible, a red strip painted across the green trestle bridge that is itself a point on a thousand-year-old trade route linking Warsaw (and Berlin and Paris further west) with Kiev (and the Caucasus and Iran to the east).
On the Polish side is the elaborate new border station, still under construction, with its camera monitors mounted atop a girdered tower and its V-shaped arrangement of truck and car lanes heading toward customs and immigration sheds. On the Ukrainian side is the small village of Starowojtowe, hidden behind the raised snowy right bank of the Bug and lined with white birches.
Cars and trucks waited on the bridge the other day. In a battered Lada sedan - the tinny automotive symbol of the former Soviet empire - was an electrician from the town of Luck (****ounced WOOSK) who said he was getting building materials on the Polish side and was untroubled by the new visa requirements.
"There's a Polish Consulate in Luck," he said, "and it only took me a day to get a visa."
But in another car, a man and a woman who gave their names as Sergei and Larissa, a taxi driver and an unemployed sales clerk from Luboml, were bitter about the new visa regulations.
"There's no work in the Ukraine," Larissa said, "so for us it's going to be very hard."
For Poland, the new situation is a mixed blessing. "Polish people fear Russia, but they don't have a fear of Ukraine or Belarus," said Holzer, the political institute director. "They think that having good relations with Ukraine and Belarus will help them be independent of Russia, and a new Iron Curtain would make it difficult to have those good relations."
Even as it has fortified its eastern frontiers, Poland has moved diplomatically to try to reassure its neighbors, most notably by issuing free visas to Ukrainians and inexpensive ones to Belarussians, about $12 each.
"When they didn't need visas, about 7,000 people a day crossed the border near here," said Krzysztof Grabczuk, the mayor of Chelm, a Polish town near Dorohusk. "Now it's about 5,000 a day and we think eventually there will be as many people as before.
"Poland is like a big 'West' for Ukrainians. They come here because they want to trade."
Poland is also a place where average salaries are five or six times those across the eastern border. In expectation of Poland's EU membership, many Ukrainians - nobody seems to know exactly how many, though certainly well into the thousands - have crossed the border over the past year or so, and are living and working in Poland without papers.
"The economy in Poland is actually quite bad, but there's still hope," said Miroslaw Werbowy, the editor of a Ukrainian-language weekly published in Warsaw. "In Ukraine, there's not even a hope, and the Ukrainians come here to share the Polish hope."
In many respects, some Polish officials say, Ukrainian immigration is needed in Poland, in part to replace the Poles who have gone West seeking higher-paying jobs themselves. The Polish police have not made an intense effort to hunt down and deport the Ukrainians working illegally. On the other hand, there is a recognition that Poland is now the main buffer between the wealthy West and the poverty-stricken East, and Poland therefore had to show it could control its borders if it wanted to gain EU membership.
This effort includes stopping the flow of contraband - from duty-free cigarettes to pirated DVDs - from Ukraine and Belarus. Indeed, border officials say that before the visa regime was imposed last October, Ukrainians made a living by crossing the border several times a day, each time carrying the two cartons of cigarettes allowed by Poland on each crossing. Anybody now seen to be crossing repeatedly in a single day is stopped, border officials say.
"About one and a half kilometers from here on the river there was a rope between the two sides," Wojcik, the lieutenant colonel, said during his guided tour of a surveillance station north of Dorohusk, one of 16 border stations on this 460-kilometer stretch between Poland and Ukraine.
"Cigarettes and compact discs were pulled across, and a farmer on the Polish side was waiting with a cart. We caught him."
Poland is also a point of entry for thousands of people from countries east of Ukraine, like Afghanistan, China, India and Vietnam. Striving to emigrate, they usually use illegal people-smuggling networks, and stopping them is among the chief goals of the border guards.
Wojcik played a videotape showing the capture a couple of years ago of 47 Afghan men attempting to cross the border near here. The Afghans were eventually handed over to the Ukrainian authorities.
Describing another interception, Wojcik said, "In one small car that you could hardly fit in, we found five women and two children from India." He added, "A 1-year-old baby had been given alcohol so it would sleep."
The Indians were found by a dog who sniffed out their secret compartment in the car, he said.
"Since the 1990s," he said, "every illegal immigrant wanted to go to Western Europe, and we knew that. We could have just said, 'O.K., go to Western Europe,' but we didn't. We stopped them even before we knew that we would belong to the EU ourselves.
"We know exactly what we have to do on this border."
International Herald Tribune
Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune
Poland's new role: European border guard
Richard Bernstein
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
DOROHUSK, Poland The message here at this gleaming new border post overlooking the thickly forested banks of the Bug River is that Poland is ready.
Inside a spotless weapons room is a rack of snub-nosed Glauberyt automatic pistols, a Polish version of the famous Uzi. There are 9-millimeter pistols in a closet, boxes of bullets, two submachine guns and green canvas kits marked "European Union" with the latest in night-vision goggles inside.
In the garage outside is a Land Rover, provided by the European Union, along with a posse of nimble red Honda XL motorcycles. Along the side of the building is a kennel where two dogs trained to follow tracks in the woods bark for attention. Not seen, but available to protect this stretch of the 525-kilometer, or 325-mile, border between Poland and Ukraine, are snowmobiles, a new helicopter and a light patrol plane, also donated by the EU.
"Of course, we understand that this will be the border of Western Europe," said Lieutenant Colonel Andrej Wojcik, commander of the newly strengthened Polish Border Guards in this area, giving a tour of the new post.
He introduces some of the 1,500 men and women under his command, shows them the new weapons and vehicles and even the very clean and secure lockup rooms where future captured illegal immigrants will be temporarily held.
Given its way, Poland would probably not be fortifying its eastern borders quite to this extent. The country is concerned about creating what some people here call a new Iron Curtain or a new Rio Grande between it and its former allies in the Soviet bloc, namely Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation, whose citizens, once able to cross into Poland by showing just their passports, now need visas, a requirement that, at least temporarily, has cut down on exchanges between Poland and the East.
But a tightly controlled, nearly impermeable border was one of many conditions that this country had to fulfill to gain EU membership, which it will receive on May 1 this year, along with nine other countries from Malta and Cyprus in the south to Estonia in the north.
"There was a belief that hordes of illegal migrants are waiting outside our borders and that our controls were inefficient," Jan Truszczynski, Poland's chief EU negotiator, said in an interview in Warsaw.
"We had to confront this type of thinking, that Poland's borders were more dangerous than other European borders," Truszczynski said, "which means that we had to beef up resources and investment along our eastern frontier."
There are several ways of considering what will be the new European border, not least of them using the grand perspective of history. The new eastern land border of Europe - Europe defined politically and economically by the soon-to-be-25-member EU - will be some 3,860 kilometers, running roughly northeast to southwest, essentially differentiating the "West" from the "East," Europe from the rest of the Eurasian continent.
"This is very moving," Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of Germany said in a recent interview, speaking in general of the shift of the European border several hundred kilometers to the east. "It's a historic moment. It will be the first time in modern history that Germany will be the center of Europe without direct threats to our border and without us threatening anybody."
Jerzy Holzer, director of the Institute for Politics of the Polish Academy of Science, put this idea from the Polish perspective: "Poland will no longer be between two big nations, Germany and Russia, which was always a dangerous situation, but in a union with many other nations who will be partners," he said.
"It's a new situation for all the Eastern countries."
In fact, as both Fischer and Holzer noted, the new arrangement is likely to bring new problems.
Indeed, the mood in Poland seems to be less one of unmitigated joy at the prospect of joining the rest of Europe and more a sense of gains measured against losses - gains with the West, losses with the East.
For the average Pole, and probably also for most members of the Polish government, the new borders are more a question of putting into effect the many regulations involved in joining Europe than a question of grand history.
In many ways the new arrangements on the borders, not just of Poland but of all the new EU member states, promise to be more complicated than before, rather than simpler.
Among 13 of the 15 older EU member states (Britain and Ireland are the exceptions), what are called the Schengen rules will prevail - Schengen being the town in Luxembourg where the agreement to eliminate border controls was made. The rules went into effect in 1995.
This means, for example, that once an outsider has arrived, legally or illegally, in, say, Germany, he or she can travel freely as far as Spain and Portugal, without ever having to display so much as a passport.
This freedom of movement, however, gave rise to the fear described by Truszczynski - that a Europe pressed up against the poorer and usually not solidly democratic states of the East will mean a sharp increase in illegal immigration, drugs and other contraband, and organized crime in the West.
And so there will be a transition period of probably several years during which the old borders between the old EU countries and the new ones will be streamlined but not eliminated.
For the foreseeable future, for example, a Polish citizen will be able to cross the border into Germany without a visa, merely by showing a passport or Polish national identity card. But there will still be a border post and Polish citizens will be allowed to stay for only a limited period, probably about three months.
According to German officials, a Pole who wanted to work in Germany would have to apply for a work permit and register with the local police once in Germany.
Worried about low-cost labor flooding in, the existing EU countries have announced restrictions on job seekers from the new states for several years.
In other words, there will remain what one German writer on the EU, Roland Freudenstein, has called "a frontier of poverty" - though it is a frontier, Freudenstein has written, with a good chance of disappearing.
In the meantime, much of the paraphernalia of borders and the long, slow lines of cars and trucks will continue to exist on such overland borders as that between Germany and the Czech Republic or Austria and Slovakia, even if the line for new EU members moves faster than before.
And then, there will be what Freudenstein has called the "Huntington border," for the political scientist Samuel Huntington's theory that the world will be divided into zones of sometimes warring civilizations.
This will be the new border between Europe and non-Europe, a long, jagged line cutting through what used to be the Soviet bloc. Along this border, controls and surveillance will not be loosened, but intensified, at least until that vague future date when countries like Ukraine and Belarus are also admitted into the European club.
Beyond that, there is the question of Russia, which is not a candidate for EU membership and has been unhappy about many aspects of the enlargement, from the spectacle of watching former satellites join the West to more stringent visa requirements. Lithuania's membership cuts Russia off from its westernmost region, Kaliningrad.
Among other demands, Russia wants unrestricted access for freight and military shipments across Lithuania to Kaliningrad; it seeks favored trading status with the EU and it wants a seat at the EU table of the ex officio sort it already enjoys at North Atlantic Treaty Organization. So far, the EU has been unwilling, drawing a line that seems to Russia to have all the qualities of a "Huntington border."
The line here in Dorohusk on the Bug River is clearly visible, a red strip painted across the green trestle bridge that is itself a point on a thousand-year-old trade route linking Warsaw (and Berlin and Paris further west) with Kiev (and the Caucasus and Iran to the east).
On the Polish side is the elaborate new border station, still under construction, with its camera monitors mounted atop a girdered tower and its V-shaped arrangement of truck and car lanes heading toward customs and immigration sheds. On the Ukrainian side is the small village of Starowojtowe, hidden behind the raised snowy right bank of the Bug and lined with white birches.
Cars and trucks waited on the bridge the other day. In a battered Lada sedan - the tinny automotive symbol of the former Soviet empire - was an electrician from the town of Luck (****ounced WOOSK) who said he was getting building materials on the Polish side and was untroubled by the new visa requirements.
"There's a Polish Consulate in Luck," he said, "and it only took me a day to get a visa."
But in another car, a man and a woman who gave their names as Sergei and Larissa, a taxi driver and an unemployed sales clerk from Luboml, were bitter about the new visa regulations.
"There's no work in the Ukraine," Larissa said, "so for us it's going to be very hard."
For Poland, the new situation is a mixed blessing. "Polish people fear Russia, but they don't have a fear of Ukraine or Belarus," said Holzer, the political institute director. "They think that having good relations with Ukraine and Belarus will help them be independent of Russia, and a new Iron Curtain would make it difficult to have those good relations."
Even as it has fortified its eastern frontiers, Poland has moved diplomatically to try to reassure its neighbors, most notably by issuing free visas to Ukrainians and inexpensive ones to Belarussians, about $12 each.
"When they didn't need visas, about 7,000 people a day crossed the border near here," said Krzysztof Grabczuk, the mayor of Chelm, a Polish town near Dorohusk. "Now it's about 5,000 a day and we think eventually there will be as many people as before.
"Poland is like a big 'West' for Ukrainians. They come here because they want to trade."
Poland is also a place where average salaries are five or six times those across the eastern border. In expectation of Poland's EU membership, many Ukrainians - nobody seems to know exactly how many, though certainly well into the thousands - have crossed the border over the past year or so, and are living and working in Poland without papers.
"The economy in Poland is actually quite bad, but there's still hope," said Miroslaw Werbowy, the editor of a Ukrainian-language weekly published in Warsaw. "In Ukraine, there's not even a hope, and the Ukrainians come here to share the Polish hope."
In many respects, some Polish officials say, Ukrainian immigration is needed in Poland, in part to replace the Poles who have gone West seeking higher-paying jobs themselves. The Polish police have not made an intense effort to hunt down and deport the Ukrainians working illegally. On the other hand, there is a recognition that Poland is now the main buffer between the wealthy West and the poverty-stricken East, and Poland therefore had to show it could control its borders if it wanted to gain EU membership.
This effort includes stopping the flow of contraband - from duty-free cigarettes to pirated DVDs - from Ukraine and Belarus. Indeed, border officials say that before the visa regime was imposed last October, Ukrainians made a living by crossing the border several times a day, each time carrying the two cartons of cigarettes allowed by Poland on each crossing. Anybody now seen to be crossing repeatedly in a single day is stopped, border officials say.
"About one and a half kilometers from here on the river there was a rope between the two sides," Wojcik, the lieutenant colonel, said during his guided tour of a surveillance station north of Dorohusk, one of 16 border stations on this 460-kilometer stretch between Poland and Ukraine.
"Cigarettes and compact discs were pulled across, and a farmer on the Polish side was waiting with a cart. We caught him."
Poland is also a point of entry for thousands of people from countries east of Ukraine, like Afghanistan, China, India and Vietnam. Striving to emigrate, they usually use illegal people-smuggling networks, and stopping them is among the chief goals of the border guards.
Wojcik played a videotape showing the capture a couple of years ago of 47 Afghan men attempting to cross the border near here. The Afghans were eventually handed over to the Ukrainian authorities.
Describing another interception, Wojcik said, "In one small car that you could hardly fit in, we found five women and two children from India." He added, "A 1-year-old baby had been given alcohol so it would sleep."
The Indians were found by a dog who sniffed out their secret compartment in the car, he said.
"Since the 1990s," he said, "every illegal immigrant wanted to go to Western Europe, and we knew that. We could have just said, 'O.K., go to Western Europe,' but we didn't. We stopped them even before we knew that we would belong to the EU ourselves.
"We know exactly what we have to do on this border."
International Herald Tribune
Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune