By Katerina Zachovalova, DPA
Komarno (Slovakia) : From January the prospect of losing her identification card will no longer haunt Eva Bucekova. The 54-year-old cook from the Slovak border town of Komarno won’t need it any more to get to work.
“I had to have a new ID made. I could not go to work for a week because I don’t have a passport,” she says, leaning on her beaten bike during a routine walk across the historical bridge that spans the Danube river.
The bridge, painted pea green, connects Komarno to a town that once used to be part of it and where she found her job: Komarom, Hungary.
When nine new European Union members, including Slovakia and Hungary, join the currently 15-member Schengen zone in which national borders are lifted, this town, which was split in two nearly 90 years ago, will get as close as possible to becoming one again.
This sleepy town hopes that once the border controls disappear in four months its fate as a doomed border outpost will soon vanish too.
Komarno was a prosperous military town until 1918 when the victorious World War I allies decided to divide the defeated Austrian-Hungarian monarchy into nation states.
The new border, drawn along the Danube, cut the mostly Hungarian-inhabited town in half. Not even a bloody uprising could reverse the fate of its left-bank historical heart that – traumatized to the bone – found itself belonging to nascent Czechoslovakia.
Since Czechoslovak authorities shut down Komarno’s ammunition factory, which was the town’s main employer, “unemployment has become the town’s staple”, Komarno historian and former vice-mayor Mihaly Macza said.
The checkpoint on the bridge has proved a mainstay too.
“Almost everyone in Komarno has an unpleasant memory of the border,” said town councillor Bela Keszegh. “In the 1980s we were allowed to cross only twice a year.”
This rule was relaxed with the fall of communism in 1989 and again in 2004 when both Slovakia and Hungary joined the EU. But under the rules of the Schengen Treaty the despised crossing will disappear altogether.
Only last November, when old Europe’s border experts gave Slovakia a disastrous report on their readiness for Schengen, the odds that border controls would soon be scrapped seemed far from good.
The country’s almost 98 km eastern border with Ukraine was not up to the task of protecting the zone’s members from smuggling or illegal migration, the report said.
However, the laggard region turned around in six months and is likely to please Franco Frattini, the European Commissioner in charge of the zone’s expansion, who is planned to visit in September.
Now Slovakia’s Interior Minister Robert Kalinak is all smiles.
“I would certainly not be a minister now,” he said in his Bratislava office with the Danube running underneath its windows, referring to what failure would have meant.
He thinks the fact that his country has managed to catch up with the rest of the Schengen newcomers is mainly due to the help of both candidates and current members, including the likes of Austria, which has repeatedly voiced reservations over the enlargement.
“The help that came from the old member states has surprised us because they could have pushed us aside,” Kalinak said. “They could have used our weakness to slow down the Schengen process.”
Contrary to his worries, the commission checking on Slovakia’s progress earlier this summer was “fair,” he said.
Kalinak is a minister in a 14-month-old government that has been popular at home but disregarded in the West – the exact opposite of its right-wing reformist predecessor.
No wonder the lot has sent shivers across Komarno, a bastion of Slovakia’s 500,000-strong Hungarian minority.
“If we create a strong region with good economic results we will not be so dependent on what the government does,” Keszegh said of cross-border plans to boost tourism and investment.
He adds that some 3,000 Komarno residents already work across the border in Komarom’s industrial park, which helped to slash the town’s unemployment rate from long-term 20 percent levels to some 5 percent.
“It will definitely be better,” said Bucekova, referring to carefree pedalling between Slovakia and Hungary as if Komarno and Komarom were what they once used to be: a single town.