SECOVCE A dozen Asians who had hoped to find freedom and prosperity in the West sit, tired and lost, behind a tin enclosure topped with barbed wire, stuck in an internment camp on the Slovakian border.

Arrested recently on the frontier between the Ukraine and Slovakia, they were taken to 60 kilometres (40 miles) to the camp in Secovce, a small ugly town of plain rowhouses built during the communist regime that fell over a decade ago.

Some 150 immigrants are in the camp, without identity papers and without much money. These people Chinese, Afghans, Indians, Vietnamese and Pakistanis do not know what awaits them and hope they will not be sent back to their homelands.

"Most of them left Asia legally as tourists by plane for Moscow. There, smugglers took their passports and transported them across the border like cattle," Gabriel Belan, border police chief for the region, said Thursday.

Sold everything

He said the immigrants had sold all they had in order to pay the 4,000-10,000 dollars (euros) demanded by the smugglers to reach Germany or Austria, the most easternmost European Union countries.

More than 2,000 immigrants have been stopped this year along Slovakia's short, 98.5 kilometre (60-mile) border with Ukraine, a border that will be an eastern frontier of the EU when Slovakia joins the Union in 2004.

It is a mountainous region, difficult to reach.

"Police patrolling with dogs is the only efficient way to watch this border," Colonel Miroslav Capulic, border police chief for southeast Slovakia, said.

Some 230 Slovak police and 60 soldiers patrol the border daily.

"Protecting the frontier is most difficult in winter since there is a lot of snow and fog. Walking through trees or heading up a trail when there are 40 centimetres (over a foot) of snow is neither easy nor pleasant," said one border guard.

The young soldiers helping out the police are to be replaced by policemen by January. The unit will be reinforced to total 450 policemen by 2005.

"This will be enough but we must get equipment we need such as cameras, infra-red binoculars, vehicles and bulletproof vests," Capulic said.

"Up until now, there has not been shooting between police and immigrants," he hastened to add, noting that the immigrants are "in most cases so tired from their journey that they stop" without fuss when faced with the police.

Then smugglers, however, are different. "When police find a group of immigrants, the smugglers run away and try to hide," Capulic said.

Worldwide problem

He said the smugglers are armed.

"It is impossible to stop illegal immigration, which is a worldwide problem, but we can at least try to control it. One of the best ways is to catch the immigrants and to send them back to their homelands," he said.

Slovakia has problems with Ukraine which does not want to re-admit immigrants who have come through its territory, Slovakian authorities said.

They said Ukraine wants proof that the immigrants transited Ukrainian soil.

"Ukraine is being difficult because it is jealous that its neighbors Slovakia, Poland and Hungary are being admitted into the EU," one policeman said. AFP