The EU keeps refugees at bay in Ukrainian camps. Border-zone inhabitants denounce a new bureaucratic curtain. A journey to the other side of the new Schengen border.
(Florian Klenk, für Falter und Berliner Zeitung, english version)

The Indians have just beaten the Pakistanis at a game of cricket. Instead of sportswear, the players are decked in old T-shirts, threadbare military overcoats and misshapen puffer jackets, and use a wooden cudgel to hit the ball out over the marshes. The men are playing near the former Habsburg village of Schönborn, now part of the Ukraine. The game is being played behind barbed wire. It takes place every day and has done for months. The players had been hoping for a new life in the European paradise. Now they sit and wait in the Pavshino deportation camp.

Valeriy Terekov watches the game every day. He’s dressed in a camouflage uniform as if a war was going on in the camp. When he speaks, his gold teeth glint. He wears an artificial fur hat. This brawny man with a face like a boxer is paid around €150 a month to guard the migrants that the EU wants to keep out. It’s a tough job: this former Soviet missile base doesn’t even have electricity.

It’s been over six months since Europe’s heads of government dismantled its eastern borders to the fanfare of a brass band. Where the Iron Curtain once cut off the Eastern Bloc, things are moving full steam. This is the happy side of these historic events: the democratization of the East, freedom, mobility and the taming of totalitarianism through prosperity. Today, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Baltic States all belong to the West. Therefore they are now tasked with protecting Europe’s border to the east. And the EU, and in particular Austria, insist that this border be impermeable.

A couple of kilometres beyond this new border, camp boss Terekov has opened the gates to the camp. “You have two hours to have a look round”, he remarks. There at the gates stands the Ukrainian military orderly Viktor Verdivara, with a crumpled doctor’s overall covering his camouflage. He wants to show us his chilly military hospital facilities. “Epidemics could break out at any time”, he tells us. What can he do about it? Verdivara shakes a small bottle containing sky blue disinfectant and points at a filthy face mask. There is no electricity in the sanitary facilities, either.

The Pavshino camp lies in the Transcarpathians, five hours’ drive from Vienna. Once the region separated the Habsburg Empire from the rest of the world. Today, this Hungarian/Slovakian/Ukrainian triangle is the latest entry point for migrants who flee towards Europe via the Middle East and Russia. 5,000 are caught every year. Three years ago the figure was a quarter of this. Until recently they took shelter in woodsheds and tents. Now 400 of them live in these huts. In his EU-donated container office, camp boss Terekov says, “we’ve only got the space for half as many”.

Outside the detainees grab the visitors/visiting journalists by the sleeve, pointing to badly healed fractures and scars. When they curse, they show the state of their teeth. Among them are many refugees from conflict zones, not only people fleeing from economic adversity. An Iraqi shows his the stump of his arm, blown off by a car bomb, he tells us in an American accent. He used to work for the US military. Now he wants to get to Sweden where all his compatriots are immediately given asylum.

In the woollen overcoats and blankets, the detainees resemble prisoners of war, but here there are no generals in charge, only Ukrainian bureaucrats overburdened by their obligations to the EU. None of them ever grant asylum to the interned, a fact confirmed by statistics. Many men tell of enduring torture in their homelands. Back home, some of them were doctors and engineers, but here they feel they are treated ‘like dogs’.

General Terekov is unable to understand the detainees and his soldiers can only bark orders in Russian and Ukrainian. There are no interpreters here, and only occasionally do lawyers find their way to the camp, funded by the catholic charity Caritas or Neeka, a Ukrainian relief organisation. Their efforts at least ensure the provision of food, water and warm clothing. A must since the huts have no doors, only rags to keep out the cold. Inside they stink of smoke, sweat and urine. In the shower room, an Indian crouches down to scrub his underwear in dirty water. He has lived here for two years and says that he is always being caught by the border guards. He can’t go home as he has no money. The little he had was stolen by the guards.

Camp boss Terekov dismisses such accusations – ‘they’re all liars’. Nevertheless the detainees’ grievances are mentioned in reports by the EU and the US organisation Human Rights Watch. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) describes the camp as a ‘legal no-man’s land’ isolated from public opinion. A notice in the camp informs that ‘Prisoners may use the telephone for three minutes every three months’.

This is the fundamental issue arising from the creation of Schengen’s new boundary.

Europe needs a border. This border is slipping further eastwards in the direction of poverty. A border must be protected otherwise it is not a border as such. The question is how far an open society should be allowed to go. Should the EU simply farm its migratory problems out to its overburdened neighbours in order to protect its own territory? Are we not responsible for the hardship of those who are marooned out there on the border?

These are both legal and political questions. The response to these questions will affect the image of Europe. Is it only a fortress? Or is it a continent of freedom?

The conditions in the Ukraine’s refugee camps today are much like those of Hungary, Poland or Slovakia ten years ago. These countries sought to join the EU and Brussels pressurised them into cleaning up their camps and reforming their state apparatus, for which they were paid. The problem is new located a couple of hours’ drive further east, out of the ‘Union of the rule of law’ as the EU likes to call itself. Here no one any longer feels responsible and critical public opinion rarely looks in this direction.

Meanwhile the European Commission demands further investment in security. Unmanned spy planes will soon be photographing the area. Observation satellites will be blasted into space. Slovakia alone has invested €100 million on border protection. A new deportation agreement will soon enter into force under which the Ukraine, categorised as a ‘safe third country, commits itself within a period of two years to take back even more ‘illegal’ migrants as quickly and unbureaucratically as possible. For this the country will receive the sum of €30 million. Not even the highest ranking officers of the border patrols know where this money will eventually end up.

These tough new conditions are not only affecting those who are ‘illegal’ but also the border population and educated Ukrainians, who are both unable to get to the West as a result of bureaucratic chicanery. The four hours it takes to enter the EU from the Ukraine offers the chance to see this in action. At the border crossing of Chop, Europe’s customs guards make all Ukrainians, without exception, open the bonnets of their cars, some of which are entirely disassembled, echoing the practice of their colleagues from the former Soviet Union. Old women are treated as criminal suspects, forced to descend from clapped-out buses and empty their plastic bags. Three men are ordered to unload the consignment of cobblestones they are carrying in a small truck and then told to put them back. Something could have been hidden underneath. The Hungarian customs men look on with their hands in their pockets.

Then comes the financial burden. A normal tourist visa costs €35, even for someone who just wants to pop over to nearest Slovakian town. For people whose average earnings are €150 or live off a pension of €70 a month, this is hardly affordable.

EU security experts are proud of these new precautionary measures. Last December Robert Kalinak, Slovakian interior minister, took over responsibility from Austria for the protection of the Schengen border. Before a group of journalists in his office, Kalinak clicked through a series of images taken with a heat-sensitive camera. The black shadows visible in the undergrowth were refugees. Kalinak remarked that the they can be picked up ‘like goods off a supermarket shelf’.

What the cameras do not show however is the fate of these shadows, most of whom end up in Pavshino. Local UNHCR chief Simone Wolken warns that the Ukraine is being ‘structurally overwhelmed’ by the tide of refugees. Sitting in her modest office near the historic Lavra orthodox monastery in Kiev, she tries to remain diplomatic. She does not want to blame the Ukrainians but the country is becoming a mire from which refugees can not escape. Europe’s expectations of the country’s democratic and institutional reforms are unrealistic. It’s high time that this was admitted. The Ukraine is no safe third country.

Beyond small donations to relief associations and camps, Europe takes on no real responsibilities, rather it eludes them. Action comes mainly from the UN, whose support for small NGOs in dilapidated suburban high-rises at least enables women and children to live in a normal, heated environment and learn a little Ukrainian.

In order to understand this chaos, a visit to Nikola Erukh is essential. He is the head of the principal Ukrainian asylum authorities in Kiev. At least that’s what Erukh believes he is. He doesn’t even have a business card, since he doesn’t know which ministry he currently belongs to. ‘It’s the fourth government reshuffle in five years’, Erukh complains as he strokes his white beard, ‘the authorities are in a state of permanent reorganisation, a total chaos’.

When he looks out of his window he sees the cars of the new rich with their tinted windows flash by, When he looks into his office he sees nothing. The civil servants stumble their way down pitch black corridors and in their offices it’s took dark to even read a file. ‘The government hasn’t paid the electricity bill’, says Erukh. How is he supposed to process an application for asylum? What should Europe do, Mr Erukh? He smiles and stretches out both hands. He needs money but he knows it will just seep away again.

This is the man who deals with the paperwork relating to the detainees who have been sitting for months in Pavshino’s huts. In previous years his office has only responded positively to around two dozen applications, In 2006 not a single one was accepted. Over a period of nine months last year, not one application was processed.

A Kafkaesque machine is in operation. More and more refugees try to cross the border illegally to escape this system. And even more are being caught. Asylum seekers can be held at Pavshino for six months. As soon as they are freed, they are caught once more. In this way, some people spend more than two years in the camp, without trial or judicial control. Once they are out of the camp, many put their fate in the hands of farmers from the border villages who know secret paths through marshland or over rivers and need to earn a bit extra. These adventures often end in death. Last winter border guards found a Chechen woman in the woods cradling her three children, all frozen to death.

Such news rarely gets into the western European press, but these deaths are almost a daily staple here in the Slovakian-Ukrainian border region. Local journalists in the border town of Uzghorod say that ‘the villagers talk about ‘snowdrops’ when they find the corpses in spring’. UNHCR spokesperson Natalia Prokopchuk adds there is a fear of foreigners and that ‘the farmers are afraid of foreign diseases’.

Uzghorod is a town of shabby high-rise estates, unfinished buildings, crumbling villas, potholed roads and pensioners who sift through the rubbish. In a small municipal building resides Victoria Kovach. She introduces herself as the ‘Chief Specialist’ of the immigration police. The sunlight that filters through the thick curtains casts a shimmering blue over her office and the portrait of President Yushchenko who barely survived the attempt to poison him to death. Ms Kovach is dressed in black. Some African men sit outside her office. Nor does she have an interpreter to understand these men. At first sight it is easy to take her for a stern bureaucrat. What Schengen has changed? Ms Kovach speaks softly and starts off by telling her own story. She had wanted to travel to Budapest to attend the funeral of a Hungarian relative. A hundred days earlier this would have been no problem. But now Schengen and the regime of European bureaucrats prevails. Ms Kovach would have had to present the deceased’s Hungarian documents to the Hungarian consulate, along with pay slips, a statement of her assets and character references. She would have had sign a document to the effect that she would never apply for asylum in the EU. She was also required to supply a ‘formal obligation’ from her Hungarian relatives committing them to covering any costs Ms Kovach might occasion during her stay in the EU. Of course it was impossible to submit all the papers in such a short period and she was unable to attend the funeral. She says she feels cut off from the world both personally and professionally. The Danish refugee committee had once again invited her to a seminar but her corresponding visa application was rejected.

Another side of this new border comes into view. It is not only the refugees who feel humiliated by the EU but also the Ukrainians themselves. Natalia Prokopchuk, UNHCR spokesperson, can tell numerous stories to this effect. She is working in the border region to ensure that illegal migrants are treated humanely, and has personal contact with diplomats, journalists and educated people who also feel excluded. Ms Prokopchuk would also love to make a private trip to the West and she has the income to do so. A long weekend in Vienna? ‘Practically impossible’ she says, particularly as a single woman. Western consulates routinely assume that she may well be working privately as a prostitute.

Donkeys and carts, drunken Roma, honking Ladas, frightened chickens and from time to time a luxury car with tinted windows. The small village of Schönborn is only a few kilometres from the Pavishno internment camp and the border town of Uzghorod. At one time a part of Habsburg Austria, the region’s towns are a Soviet version of Austrian provincial towns such as St. Pölten or Hollabrunn. Many topographic names are also a reminder of those times. The towns have names such as Mädchendorf, Plankendorf, Blaubart and Birkendorf. Schönborn’s road signs are bilingual and the façade of the church reads ‘Glory to God’ in German. Once these lands belonged to the grandfather of the current Archbishop of Vienna. And Otto Habsburg, as the farmers proudly relate, once passed through here.

Here the farmers are unaware of the hardships of the refugees in the forest of Pavshino. That a few kilometres away, behind barbed wire fences, India has beaten Pakistan at a game of cricket is one aspect of globalisation that these people would find astonishing. Like the 62-year-old Anna Lockes for example, who stands in front of her farm in a stained apron and says she’s only seen ‘black figures’, who time and again ‘crawl through the bushes’. Frau Lockes describes them using colourful old German insults – ‘horse entrails and swine gullets’.

Frau Lockes says she can only weep when she sees how the village has declined. She speaks German as it was spoken 300 years ago, Swabian, like her ancestors who settled here during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa. ‘Death for the parents, hardship for us and bread for the children’ was their motto. This did not come true for Anna Lockes. Power politics has left its mark on the village – Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Nazi Germans and the Soviets all ruled here and Anna Lockes never had her belly full. The Russians taunted her with names such as ‘Hitleri’ and ‘Fritzi’. Many of her German-speaking neighbours ended up in the gulags of Siberia in revenge for the Nazi massacres. The Jews of the nearby town of Mukachevo were deported to Auschwitz on the orders of Eichmann.

‘Mikhail Gorbachev opened the border for us’ says Lockes. There was hope in the village. Now that’s all over. When the farmers become ill, the doctor sends them to mass with Father Burkhard, since God is the only one who works for free. Wrapped up in thick overcoats, a hundred people are reciting the rosary and hoping for a miracle. ‘Money is the law here! Blessed are the poor’ are the Bavarian priest’s words of comfort. There isn’t a lot more he can say.

Father Burkhard is certainly no rebel, but when the subject of Schengen comes up, he exclaims that ‘it makes my blood boil!’ and demands ‘revolution’. He sits in his rectory, a cuckoo clock ticking in the background beside a map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Before the drawing of the new border, the people used to buy on the neighbouring country’s black market, and this brought a degree of prosperity. The villagers could fill up their cars cheaply in the Ukraine and resell the petrol in Slovakia. The difference paid for the vegetables. Today on the border the police note down the number of the smallest Lada seen filling up. The people are treated ‘like clandestine workers’. ‘An old lady’, says Burkhard, ‘stands crying at the border because the guards have confiscated her two bottles of home-distilled vodka. Is this what Europe is about?’ Everyone here, he says, used to live off the black market. Now with the spread of this ice-cold capitalism, they vegetate in their own filth, unable to pay their gas bills.

Anxious farmers, forgotten refugees, humiliated intellectuals. You could be forgiven for forgetting that it was not Europe but the Soviet Union that plunged this land into poverty. The EU gave the people hope. The EU was always a model to follow. The Ukrainians are still dreaming of this union. The question is for how much longer.