Polish customs strike hits Belarus, Ukraine border

Wildcat strikes by Polish customs workers brought to a halt international traffic at selected Belarusian and Ukrainian border check points, officials in Minsk and Kiev said Friday. Cars and lorries were stuck in lengthening queues in both directions at the Varshavsky Most and Domachevo crossing sites, a pair of heavily-used road transit points on the Polish-Belarusian border, said Belarus customs spokesman Aleksander Tishchenko, according to Belapan news agency report.

"The Polish customs workers are only admitting vehicles with diplomatic license plates," Tishchenko said. "Otherwise nothing is getting through."

Other crossing sites were functioning normally, but due to the shutdown of the two highway checkpoints, hundreds of long-distance lorries moving goods westward were for practical purposes trapped in Belarus, he said.

Rail traffic in neighbouring Ukraine also was affected by a localised strike, Ukrainian officials said, citing a Polish government Friday warning Polish customs officials would not process goods moving between Ukraine and Poland at three key rail checkpoints.

More than 1,500 rail cars already were stacked up on the Ukrainian side of the border, most loaded with ore, coal, and metal, according to a statement by the Ukrainian national customs service.

Road traffic between Poland and Ukraine was similarly snarled, according to an early afternoon Interfax news agency report, with traffic jams exceeding a kilometre in length reported at the Kravovets-Korchova, Rava-Ruska-Hrebenne, and Shegini-Medyka crossing points.

Polish border workers were processing drivers and their vehicles at a snail's pace, forcing waits of three or more hours on motorists, witnesses said.

The Polish side of the Shegini-Medyka checkpoint, along the Warsaw-Kiev highway, was only passing through 27 vehicles an hour, a massive slowdown given the several hundred cars and lorries passing through each normal business hour, an official from Ukraine's Lviv border troops command said.

The Polish work stoppages on both the Ukrainian and Belarusian frontiers are part of an effort by the Polish customs officials to improve their working conditions, the Interfax news agency reported.

Poland as of the beginning of 2008 became an active member of the Shengen treaty group, obliging Warsaw to enforce strict European Union admission standards on all of Poland's non-EU borders.

Polish border officials prior to the change warned of insufficient government funding needed to control the massive flow of traffic between Poland and its eastern neighbours Belarus and Ukraine, and threatened collective action to force Warsaw to provide resources.