The Manhunters of the German Borderpatrol
...Rumanian trespasser arrested and handcuffed with a plastic strip...
Piet den Blanken (1951) is a wellknown Dutch photojournalist, whose
pictures frequently appear in European magazines and newspapers. He has
published photobooks on very diverse subjects, such as the war in El Salvador
(take a look at what happened to this Salvadorian one-armed
kid-soldier),
social life in small villages, people in prisons and country planning.
And together with scientist Lou Keune of Tilburg University he made a book on El Salvador:
Overleven in Oorlogstijd, in spanish:
Sobrevivimos la Guerra
.
Recently he also published a series of astonishing
Oder-Neisse-pictures.
His newest production concerns the life of prostitutes.
This series is called The Prostitution Pictures. The pictures show whores and streetwalkers on various places in the world, working or private.
The pictures of the manhunt at the Oder-Neisse that you find here, are part of a ambitious project to photograph the new borders of Europe. Check out his report on the littleknown Ceuta-tragedy. Ceuta is a small Spanish enclave in Marocco: the gateway (or better: the trap) - to Europa for innumerable Africans.
Den Blanken is also present at the comprehensive website of Dutch and Belgian photojournalists: The Eye of the Low Countries.
Last but not least: Den Blanken has an own homepage, from where you can find links to all his pictures.
Den Blanken recently visited the Oder-Neisse border between Germany and Poland. The German orderpatrol consists partly of former East-German Vopo's who used to guard he Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. Now they are hunting their former friends from Eastern Europe. Tens of thousands of those comrades try to cross the border to get into the wealthy west.
Germans living near the border willingy warn the police or borderpatrol when they see someone suspect walking down the road. The illegal border-crossers are arrested, locked up and sent back - after they have paid the German police for expenses: the food, the lodging in the cell, the administration-costs.
The Romanians (more than five thousand of them are captured here every year) also have to pay for an airplane-ticket Berlin-Bukarest, because they are send home by air.
Everybody is allowed to keep only the sum of 50 German Marks, about 30 US Dollars. This way many of them lose all the money have saved in years. Most of them are desperate and make clear that they will come back and try again...
In the past Den Blanken has also done extensive photo-reporting on the trespassers at the US-Mexican border. Comparing the two borders he says that events on the American border tend to be more violent. There is more crime going on there, drugs-smuggling, robbery and things like that. The US borderpatrol has access to more sophisticated material like heli's, ultrared-binoculairs and guns.
On the Oder-Neisse border shots are seldom heard. On the other hand, many trespassers drown, because these two rivers are definitely more dangerous than they look.
All pictures are in jpeg-format.
Captured
in the fields. (64 Kb)
Searching
the neighbourhood. (34 Kb)
Defeated.
(32 Kb)
You can e-mail your comments to the photographer Piet den Blanken:
Letter
to Piet
Just click on the letter
© 1997 Rob Ruggenberg (homepage).
Last modified: January 20, 1997