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Monday, Apr 19, 2004

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International

Poland is pushed closer to the edge

By Ed Vulliamy

HORODLO (POLAND), APRIL 18. Come May Day, the edge of the edge of Europe will be a red-and-white, diagonally painted concrete column, with a white eagle and the word Polska on it; dug into the pine and birch woodland skirting the Bug river, it divides Poland from Ukraine, new West from new East.

The river rounds a bend at the little village of Horodlo, where the faithful flock to church for Monday evening Mass, and peasants bring carts of firewood home through the grey of late afternoon.

Here is the easternmost point of a new 3,860km frontier of the European Union, which on May 1 admits 10 new members, seven of them countries that lived under Stalin's repressive regime. The process that began with the rise of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement in 1981 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 comes to fruition here.

Springtime is stirring in the little park in Horodlo and in the Sparrow pub, to which Darek and Monika have returned from Warsaw, hoping the frontier will mean new business. "They're bringing in 40 extra policemen just for our little village," says Monika, "to add to the two we have at the moment. And that's in addition to the border guards."

"They've been chasing out the Ukrainians," says Janusz, who keeps the mini-market, "because the Ukrainians bring in smuggled cigarettes to sell for two zlotys, while we have to sell them for five. Now people will have to come to us for a smoke."

The border of the new E.U. is both porous and harsh. Upriver, what they call the new "Velvet Curtain" is being drawn, on Brussels' insistence — a necklace of new guard posts manned by thousands of newly recruited armed men. But this is a border across which tens of thousands journey each day, and a smugglers' terrain for anything from alcohol to people. Monika's pub is a rarity in rural Poland, boasting an array of tequilas, malt whisky and cocktails.

This is land where peasants farm fertile black soil, where storks nests atop telegraph poles and trees hang with clumps of mistletoe. It is also soaked in history, much of it epic and bloody. Armies have marched across these plains for centuries, to subjugate the Poles — Nazi and Soviet, Prussian and Russian.

Indeed, the demographic engineering of Horodlo puts it at some bitter kernel of twentieth-century history, between Holocaust and Cold War: in 1939 the village was one-third Jewish, one-third Polish and one-third Ukrainian. By 1945 the Jews had all been exterminated at the nearby Majdanek camp; the Ukrainians shipped across the border to the USSR; and the parents or grandparents of 60 per cent of the present population — Poles living in Ukraine — deported `home' in the opposite direction. "So you see what politics can do," says the village priest, Krzystof Krukowski.

It was in Horodlo, in 1413, that a great power was forged by treaty, not war, binding Poland and Lithuania to create the biggest country in medieval Europe. And it is peace that now brings this corner of Europe into a union. Or, as the mayor of the nearby county seat of Chelm puts it: "We do not see ourselves as the edge of something, but more as its gateway — to the East and its markets."

Indeed, the quiet of evening in Horodlo belies the scene on the riverbank a little to the north, at Dorohusk: a hinge on a burgeoning trade corridor connecting Berlin to Moscow via Warsaw and Kiev. It is the busiest border crossing between Poland and Ukraine, a confusion of cafes, currency exchange booths, tatty old Ladas driven by leather-faced peasants and grinding trucks lined up for five km, waiting to cross in either direction. Heading from Warsaw to Odessa, Stefan has been here nearly 48 hours and expects a similar wait on the other side, where "you have to get 10 stamps on bits of paper, and each one needs a bribe."

Every day 12,000 people cross here — where none did in Soviet times — one of 15 crossing points along Poland's (and the E.U.'s longest) external border with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. They do so under the watchful eyes, weaponry and cameras of Lieutenant-Colonel Andrzej Wojcik's border guardsmen.

Since he joined the guard in 1981, then under communist military authority, Wojcik's life has been the border. But now that this border is Europe's front line — against what Brussels and politicians fear will be a flow of people and goods seeking to cross into the E.U. — the colonel plays "a game of cat and mouse, or chess", against what he calls "the other side," in which "you have to anticipate its next move, and plan your own."

But Wojcik insists: "We are not putting up another Berlin Wall, we are creating an opening for legal activity while stepping up security to stop illegal activity."

The traffic in people has become Wojcik's biggest challenge, with some 20,000 either caught or turned back each year. "Either something is wrong with their papers, or we find them concealed or working illegally," he says. He shows a video of groups of Indians and Kurds marshalled by their criminal couriers across bogland on the other side of the Bug, unaware they have been picked up on film by the guards' thermo-sensitive equipment that responds to human body heat.

"Unfortunately these people are not insured, and do not get their money back," he says. "They would probably have paid between $7,000 and $8,000 each." More successful migrants are usually passed on from Ukrainian to Polish mafia syndicates, moved across country to the German border, then handed over to the Germans and shipped elsewhere in the West. "We can fight this problem," says the colonel, "but we can never solve it. So long as there are economic disparities, these people will come, just as smuggling will continue while there are price disparities. We can fight the problem but we're not here to save the world." In Wojcik's Lublin district, 16 new box-style brick installations with detention facilities have been built along the "green border" kitted out with a playground of snowmobiles, vehicles for fording rivers and racks of pristine PM98 machine guns. —

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