25 May 2001
Belarus plans no new installations on Polish border
Belarus will neither build new installations on its Polish border, nor tear down the old ones, Aleksandr Pavlovsky, chairman of Belarus' State Border Troops Committee, told reporters following his May 23-24 talks in Brest with Marek Bienkowski, chief of Poland's Border Guard.
"Removing the polls and the barbed wire would take a great lot of money, so we just take them away them as they fall down," General Lieutenant Pavlovsky said. "We are against keeping such installations on the Belarusian-Polish border. We are neither building nor planning any on our Baltic and Ukrainian border."
"We inherited 400 kilometers of border installations from the Soviet Union, but it would be wrong to waste money on removing them," the general said. "Rebuilding the barriers or erecting new ones is not under discussion between us and our Polish colleagues, and we are not going to raise that issue in the near future. We have new means of fighting illegal migration."
Brigadier General Bienkowski said, "I assure you that we are not going to erect any walls and we are not going to build any new installations." When asked when Poland planned to introduce visas for Belarusians, Mr. Bienkowski said it was "the jurisdiction of the Polish government." It was the first meeting of the two countries' border chiefs since Poland joined NATO. "The Belarusian and Polish border authorities are against double standards and want the problems faced by both states to be solved," Mr. Pavlovsky said after he and General Bienkowski signed a final communique.
According to Mr. Pavlovsky, plans for this year include mutual assistance on law enforcement, meetings between Belarusian and Polish border officers working at the international airports of Minsk and Warsaw, and the fourth round of talks on a Belarusian-Polish border treaty. ("Belapan")
http://brestonline.com/en/news/news5.html