41176KA -a car with this number (they claim) had left a few kilometres into Bulgaria yet another group of Syrian refugees crossing illegally the border with Turkey. Before that all their papers, cash and mobile phones had been taken away from them. The people telling me all this sleep in one of Edirne's streets. To no avail I try to explain to them that this is not a Bulgarian car number because if it were it would start with letters (like X or Y), not with digits; and also that had they had passports they would have been free to demand asylum at the border checkpoint without paying to traffickers, getting lost in the woods or being bitten by border police dogs. Now they are ready to raise again lots of cash and try again and again their luck to reach Germany illegally. They estimate their chances at 50/50.

Hours earlier with the colleagues from France 3 Regis Nusbaum and Noe Salem we saw the work of border police, and detailed checks for human presence in the cargo sections of long trucks. The deputy head of the border checkpoint at Lessovo Mr Dimitrov gave us the precise number of illegal migrants detained at the border - 990 in 2014 and 750 since the beginning of this year. This is a relatively small checkpoint where the queue of trucks is shorter than onekilometre. In both directions off the checkpoint, a dissuasive facility is under construction - two rows of barbed wire with several lines of clews on the inner and upper sides. Its purpose is clear to Mr Dimitrov - it is there to stop migrants risking to get lost in wooded and mountainous regions and to redirect them to the valley. Neither he, nor the Bulgarian and Turkish guards, nor construction engineer Kulaksazov from Yambol with whom we talked at the very frontier line, entertain any illusions that a 4-mm barbed wire could possibly stop people fleeing bombs. My colleagues agree. According to Noe, “the fence will stop only the weakest”. Regis sees more than historical irony in Europe's position: having abandoned the walls of shame shortly, it is now busy building new ones. We take a picture of the rusty wire at the former frontier post and by the collapsed gate stands one of the European surveillance cameras. At this moment we can be seen in the town of Elhovo, in Sofia and in any border control centre of the European Union. Here is Regis:

„Why do refugees head to Europe? It is the closest, most secure and richest destination where they can find refuge, work and resume normal existence. Is a fence of wall a solution? No, it is not because walls and fences tend to collapse, although outside Europe the wall between the two Koreas is older than 50 years. No one knows whether the fence under construction in Bulgaria will be completed and how effective it will be. Will it stop illegal migrants? Yes, in part maybe. Is it a solution? No. West Europe bears its responsibility. France, Austria and Germany are not first-line countries so they delegate the function of gendarme to countries like Hungary and Bulgaria without paying them the money they need to tackle the huge human inflow that becomes unmanageable at a certain point.”

Though Regis's report has been placed in the television's evening news, top stories rather show brutal pictures of Hungary's stations and highways and the picture of little Aylan. TV ratings couldn't care less about hundreds of new detainees brought every day to the camp in the town of Harmanli, Bulgaria. Most of them in fact leave the moment they file an asylum application (in the bracket from 28 August to 3 Septemberone third of them left - only 995 from 1465 remained). Fifty kilometres away, in Talat Pasha Str. a father with his two children and his wife have to collect tens of thousands of euro to try their luck. This cash too will go into the pockets of organized crime groups where cooperation is much tighter than at the EU level. Their profits are guaranteed regardless of the final result. And these for sure exceed the money allocated to border control and building new fences and walls. We all pay for them regardless of the final result.

English Daniela Konstantinova