Prague: Nine mainly ex-East bloc countries today tore down their borders to join a European zone allowing 400 million people to travel from the Arctic Circle in Norway to Portugal without showing a passport.

"The free movement of people is one of the main rights of human beings," European Commission president Jose Manuel Barrosso said as he hailed the addition of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia to 15 other states already in the Schengen Treaty zone.

Many European leaders have welcomed the pulling down of internal frontiers as a new sign of the continent overcoming its Cold War division. But many people have also expressed fears of increased crime and illegal immigration. Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico sawed down the frontier barrier at the Berg-Petrzalka crossing point between their countries to start three days of commemorations for the landmark change.
"From midnight tonight, you can travel 4,000 kilometre from Tallinn in Estonia to Lisbon in Portugal without any border controls," said Fico.

The Hungarian and Austrian interior ministers, Albert Takacs and Guenther Platter, dismantled the barriers at the Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland-Fertorakos crossing point, where in 1989 the two countries foreign ministers cut the fence that symbolised the Iron Curtain.

The Czech and Slovak interior ministers marked the elimination of police checks at Europe s newest frontier at Stary Hrozenkov, formed when their two countries were formed from the 1993 split of former Czechoslovakia.

Source : PTI