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12/29/2009

Border marker 501 separates Serbia from the European Union, or from "Europe," as the people here call it. The lights of the Hungarian village of Röszke flicker on the far side of the border. On the Serbian side, Aleksandar Jelenkovic's boots make a crunching sound as he walks through the frozen snow.

Jelenkovic, an officer in Belgrade's border troops who is on nighttime patrol here, has seen his responsibilities change since midnight, when new rules came into effect, allowing citizens of Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro to travel to "Europe" without a visa. The EU's diplomatic gift to residents of the western Balkans holding forgery-proof passports has arrived just in time for the Orthodox feast of St. Nicholas.

"Nicholas is the patron saint of travelers, and my son, born four years ago today, is named after him," says Jelenkovic. The border guard is 27 years old and has never left the territory of the former Yugoslavia. "For my generation," he says, "travel has been virtually impossible until now."

Since former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic unleashed the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, Serbia has been treated as the "leper" of Europe, subjected to sanctions, bombed by NATO and cut off from neighboring Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria by the EU's external border. For this reason, says Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic, the lifting of visa requirements is comparable to the "fall of the Bastille" for his people. In a speech at the border crossing on Dec. 19, Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic spoke of delayed justice, saying: "Finally, the same rules that apply for others apply for us as well."

His words carry a hint of the hubris and wounded pride that is often heard from Belgrade diplomats. In truth, "the same rules" still do not apply to all who live on the periphery of the EU. Citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania and the former Serbian province of Kosovo, as well as Ukraine and Belarus, remain excluded from the lifting of travel restrictions to EU countries.

Trying Their Luck

The Interior Ministry's guards stationed at the northern Serbian border experience the consequences every day. Many of the people who have to have a visa to enter EU territory, but fail to get one, try their luck in the countryside, on foot, and preferably under the cover of night.

After withdrawing its army from the country's 627-kilometer (390-mile) border with Hungary and Romania three years ago, Belgrade brought in police officers. The men, who are paid a monthly salary of €350 ($500), face an almost hopeless uphill battle. There are only five off-road vehicles equipped with thermal imaging cameras nationwide, and the gasoline ration the border guards are allotted for their Lada car, which they use to travel from the Martonos base to border marker 501, is only sufficient to drive 30 kilometers a day.

This restriction forces them to patrol the border on foot in the bone-chilling cold, armed with nine-millimeter pistols and carrying Russian-made night-vision devices in their hands. They walk along a railroad embankment running from the Serbian village of Horgos across the border into Hungary, or along swaths cut into the forest on both sides of the brightly lit border crossing on the road to the Hungarian city of Szeged.

Across the Border with Google Maps

"Albanians from Kosovo usually come in groups and are organized. They have facilitators on both sides of the border," say the Serb border guards. "The Afghans, on the other hand, simply enter their destination into Google Maps and start walking."

The eerie images transmitted by the thermal imaging camera to two monitors in the mobile border protection team's off-road vehicle are dramatic: A lone Afghan is seen walking into no-man's land holding an open umbrella -- "like Mary Poppins," the border guards say mockingly. Other images show three Kosovars who desperately try to hide by lying down on their stomachs in waist-high grass before they are discovered and taken away.

The Serbs documented 1,147 successful "apprehensions" along their northern border in the period from January to November 2009. Their better-equipped Hungarian counterparts had already reported 1,817 arrests of illegal immigrants by the end of August. When these figures are extrapolated to the entire year, an estimated 4,000 immigrants will have been prevented from crossing into the EU along this section of its external border alone. Taking into account the estimated number of unreported cases, between 15,000 and 40,000 people are likely to have made it into Western Europe via Hungary in the last 12 months.

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• Part 1: EU Welcomes 'Leper of Europe' Back into the Fold
• Part 2: Hoping for a Lucky Break