Prague - European leaders continued to celebrate Friday the
expansion of the so-called Schengen zone, in which internal borders
are scrapped, to nine new states.
Swarmed by television crews, Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek
and his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk sawed through yet another
symbolic red toll gate at Hradek nad Nisou border crossing in an area
where the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany meet.
'I remember when we chopped wires in 1989, when I first made it to
Vienna's Mariahilfer Strasse and bought a deep fryer,' the Czech
premier said, referring to the tearing down of the barbed-wired Iron
Curtain after European communism fell in 1989.
'We have today finished a process, which began with cutting
wires,' he said. 'We have become equal by entering the Schengen
area.'
The premiers were joined at the ceremony by German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso,
European Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering and Portuguese
Prime Minister Jose Socrates.
On Friday morning, five schoolchildren from Konecna, an eastern
Czech hamlet that found itself behind a border checkpoint between the
Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1994, went to school for the first
time without flashing their passports.
'People here are really happy,' Tomas Vecera, the mayor of the
village of Bila that administers the hamlet, told Deutsche Presse-
Agentur dpa.
'When they wanted to bring home a fridge, coal or even a sack of
grain, they had to declare it,' he said speaking by telephone from
Friday's festivities, which the village held at the despised border
checkpoint.
At midnight, Czechs, Poles and Slovaks welcomed the end of border
controls with fireworks and music at several, now already former,
border crossings.
In the town of Cesky Tesin, in the Czech Republic's north-east,
divided by a border from its Polish part in 1920, locals crammed the
border bridge, where the two towns now plan to revive a cafe.
Before border patrols had finished their final shift across
Central Europe, people rushed to get their passports stamped for one
last time.
Slovak Interior Minister Robert Kalinak was rubber-stamping
passports himself during celebrations at the Slovak-Austrian
Petrzalka/Berg crossing on the outskirts of the Slovak capital
Bratislava, public broadcaster Czech Television reported.
But there was not much to celebrate Friday on the newly-fortified
external borders of the expanded borderless area named after the
Luxembourg village of Schengen.
Trucks formed a long queue through villages leading to the Vysne
Nemecke/Uzhorod border crossing from Slovakia to Ukraine, TA3 news
channel said.
In his speech Friday, Topolanek wished that those left outside the
passport-free zone would also one day experience such a festive day.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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