Europe's frontier pushes Poland closer to the edge

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 2,400-mile (3,860km) frontier of the European Union, which on 1 May 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 (28p), while we have to sell them for five. Now people will have to come to us for a smoke.'

The border of the new EU 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, of storks' nests atop telegraph poles and trees hung 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 cafés, currency exchange booths, tatty old Ladas driven by leather-faced peasants and grinding lorries lined up for five kilometres, 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 EU'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 EU - 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' (where there are no crossings) kitted out with a playground of snowmobiles, motorbikes, vehicles for fording rivers and racks of pristine PM98 machine guns. There are kennels inhabited by intimidating dogs, for searching 'and for protection'. 'But not a shot has been aimed at anyone,' says Wojcik, 'only into the air in case anyone thinks they are dealing with Boy Scouts.'

In addition to people, the 1,500 guards look for stolen icons, alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. 'Come 1 May,' he says, 'we can say that we will be safeguarding the border of the European Union. But this is not something that has happened overnight - we have been working on this for years, and they [the EU] have watched us work.' Indeed 'they' have, as Michal Czyz recounts back in Warsaw, heaving a sigh.

Czyz heads a special European Union section at the Foreign Ministry of Poland's centre-left government, which - on the eve of enlargement - faces widespread and politically perilous public disillusionment over what he bluntly calls 'broken promises' by current member states, markedly Britain, over freedom of movement and access to work and services.

'We have been under the microscope, and met every demand, on every level. On the technical level, over securing the border, there has been no mercy on us. Economically, we have been trying to do in a decade what your countries did in centuries. But meanwhile, from current member states, the political willingness to unite Europe is in trouble. With regard to the social dimension, there are problems with freedom of movement; and psychologically, we new countries are still outsiders, and not yet part of your "we".'

Poland's efforts are not reciprocated, says Czyz, by the scramble among current member states to restrict the movement and rights of workers from eastern Europe. 'We feel that we are being punished for being too optimistic,' he says. 'There was a conviction that we were strong enough, enthusiastic enough. But things are much less optimistic now.'

This is not party political banter. Czyz's views are held by his opposition, the Civic Platform, whose secretary-general is a former mayor of Warsaw, Pawel Piskorski. 'It has all turned out much worse for Poland than expected,' he says. 'The problem for us who are very pro-EU is that, come 1 May, all the obligations and requirements - even the disadvantages of membership - will be visible to the people, while the advantages will be hidden or deferred.'

Another conservative, former Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, asks, in the light of Britain's clampdown on rights for east European workers: 'Are we joining what you already are, or are we joining you in helping to plan what this great adventure - the new Europe - will be. There's a lesson here that neither we nor you have learnt: what does "Europe" mean. Does it mean we are joining you, or we are all coming together?'

Jerzy Holzer, until recently director of political studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, says carving a harsh border between Poland and Ukraine or Belarus, as was done by the Soviet Union, would be 'unsettling' to many cultural, personal and family ties binding people on either side. 'What we want is a border that does what we do not at present - that is, keep out organised crime - but which does not upset the cultural weave of the region.'

As his congregation emerges from Mass into the dusk in Horodlo, Krukowski says: 'This is a dying village, whatever the EU may bring. People cannot sell their produce; they have no money and prices are rising. The population declines each year as young people leave. This year we have had 13 marriages, 37 baptisms and 80 funerals. I'm not nostalgic for communism, but people had a better standard of living then, and the Church is blamed for backing the transformation. With Europe, a decline here is an opportunity somewhere else. I understand why they go.'

Krukowski offers a hearty meal of golabki - buckwheat wrapped in cabbage. But he doesn't eat, deep in thought beneath his crucifix and Our Lady of Sorrows. 'Even the fact that the earth here is the richest in Poland is not enough. I am not an economist, and do not understand why. My only hope is that in lifting the borders within Europe we do not create a border here that is harder to cross than it was before.'