Normally Looser is stationed in St Gallen in eastern Switzerland. She applied for a rotation in the Swiss Frontex pool because she wanted to familiarise herself with the outermost boundaries of the Schengen Area, which Switzerland is also part of.

Greek police patrolling the border with Turkey near Orestiada
(Keystone)

Schengen is a borderless, free movement area comprising 26 European countries. These countries have abolished internal border controls while at the same time strengthening external controls with non-Schengen states.

Switzerland, Greece and Frontex share responsibilities for the Swiss border guard’s placement. Switzerland pays and employs her, while Frontex coordinates her mission and covers on-site costs. Greece is in charge of operations.

Stopping illegal entries

During her day and night shifts at the Kipi border crossing, Looser wears the blue uniform of the border guard, a Frontex-band on her right arm and a service weapon in her belt.

Among other things, her job is to check the authenticity of documents of people entering Greece, to thwart illegal immigration. “You see falsified passports and visas all the time,” said Looser.

Since joining Schengen, Switzerland is in principle not allowed to check passports at its borders, except as a part of customs control. In contrast, at Schengen’s external borders it is obligatory to verify the documentation of everyone attempting to enter.

“Each and every person is very carefully checked,” said Looser. Other than that, she observed, the work in Kipi is the same as in St Gallen. “All over the world people simply want to get from point A to point B.”

Looser, who is also a trained gardener, is a specialist in searching vehicles. “Basically, you can hide people in any vehicle – be it a Smart car or a lorry,” she said. But she won’t be any more specific than that.

Not surprisingly, discretion is an absolute must in this line of work, with Frontex employees subject to strict guidelines about the disclosure of tactical information.

“We work according to the laws of the host country and are there to provide support,“ explains Looser. “No one has to tell the Greeks how to protect the border – they know what they’re doing.”

From Kipi we drive 80 kilometres north, along the wooded banks of the Evros. On the other side of the river is Turkey. From there, desperate migrants try again and again to find a boat that will ferry them across the river to European soil. They come from countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia.

(swissinfo)Countless dramas have been played out on the Evros. But today it is quiet, with hardly a border guard or a patrol dog to be seen. Perhaps they are hiding somewhere, behind the trees and hedges?
Greece has massively ramped up its patrol activities in recent years in response to the ever-mounting numbers of irregular migrants. In cooperation with Frontex, it monitors the Evros region with helicopters, night vision goggles and thermal cameras.

Two or three years ago the refugee route ran predominantly across the narrow strip of land in the north where the Evros river comes to an end and meadows and fields mark the Greek-Turkish border.

Here, hundreds of people used to illegally cross the border on a daily basis. But a 12.5-kilometre steel fence, erected at the beginning of 2013, put a stop to this. Now it is virtually impossible to cross by land from Turkey into Greece.

At the police station in the city of Orestiada we meet Panos Zevgolatakos, a policeman who is deputy head of border control for the district. He drives us through fields of grain and sunflowers. Five hundred metres from the border the military zone begins. A young soldier and her colleague stand guard, machine guns at the ready.
A lieutenant colonel escorts us through the military zone. We are allowed 15 minutes to look at and photograph the four-metre high double fence topped with rolls of barbed wire. About a metre of Greek soil lies behind this controversial “iron curtain“.

Beyond that is Turkey – and in Turkish territory photographs are forbidden. As are photographs of the lieutenant colonel.

READ MORE HERE ON SWISSINFO.CH:

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/new–iron-curtain–in-europe-fights-illegal-migration/40483966