Should Europe seal its borders, or open them to a quota of economic refugees? An Observer investigation reveals how well-connected people-traffickers working out of Sarajevo are raising the stakes in a #4 billion trade Special report: refugees in Britain Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor, in Sarajevo, Chris Morris and Mahmut Kaya in Istanbul Sunday January 28, 2001 Bag Wahab was one of the unlucky ones. On Friday the 26-year-old Turk sat in the arrivals area at Sarajevo airport, surrounded by police, his head bowed, close to tears. An agricultural labourer and father of two children, he had sold his land and spent all his savings to enter Europe as an illegal migrant. Wahab fell at the first hurdle. As dozens of young men with similar ambitions passed through immigration into Bosnia, jumping-off point for the 'Sarajevo Route' into the EU, Wahab's lack of education let him down. He thought he was arriving in a country called Sarajevo, at a capital called Grozny. The State Border Service informed him he would be sent home. Like dozens of other young men from Tunisia and Turkey who had passed through, their tickets and passports in order, and with sufficient cash to be allowed to stay, Wahab had said he was a tourist. Sitting in a corner of the departures lounge, his journey over, he abandoned the dissimulation. 'I was trying to get to France to work,' he told The Observer. 'I've already spent most of my money paying a commission to come in. Now what I am going to do? What is going to happen to me?' Wahab is the exception rather than the rule. Half an hour later the others who arrived from Istanbul with him were heading for an unofficial rank of cabs that pull up on a verge just outside the airport compound on the days the Turkish flight comes in, specifically to carry migrants. Where they are taken next is Sarajevo's biggest open secret. Those not taken by van or taxi immediately to the Croatian border will spend a few days in a hotel, among them the Alemko, a low, dilapidated, purple building not far from the city centre. The Orijent and Palas hotels are also favourites with the criminal gangs running the people-smuggling rackets. Their next step was revealed by a surveillance operation set up by officers of the International Police Task Force in Sarajevo in December, who tracked three groups of migrants to small hotels and safe houses close to the international borders they will cross by foot, in boats across the Sava river, or even in the back of empty fuel tanker lorries specially equipped with benches, all of them en route for Fortress Europe. Wahab and the other young men who arrived on Friday are the willing victims of the world's fastest-growing crime, a trade that the International Organisation for Migration calculates is worth upwards of #70 million a year in Bosnia alone. Worldwide, the UN estimates, the smugglers earned around #4 billion in the past 12 months alone. Coming to Bosnia is not a crime. But what they will try to do when they are here is definitely illegal. And few have any doubt that the smuggling of migrants is being aided through Bosnia by police and politicians at the highest level. According to Geoffrey Beaumont, coordinator of the UN's project to set up a functioning Bosnian State Border Service, more than 10 per cent of the half million illegal migrants who reached the EU last year came via the Bosnian route. And although Croatia has been catching up to 5,000 of them a year, few are in any doubt that, deported back to Bosnia, most will try again. By their third attempt officials believe most will have crossed into Europe proper. It is a route fast becoming one of the biggest headaches for the EU. Last week European Commissioner Chris Patten announced extra aid for training Bosnian and other Balkan police forces in the fight against migrant-smuggling after it was raised by EU Foreign Ministers. The announcement comes against a background of a rising sense of crisis in the EU over illegal migration which has increased more than tenfold in the past 10 years. Across Europe arrests at borders are rocketing, as are asylum applications across the 15 nations. In Bosnia the traffic in illegal migrants conceals a second, more venal trade in humans: the trade in sex slaves which lures women and young girls to Bosnia 'mainly from Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics' with the promise of jobs as au pairs or waitresses in the EU. In one of the most shocking cases, uncovered last summer, 12 women and young girls were found locked in a darkened room in a bar in the town of Prijedor, where they had been held and repeatedly raped. According to officials who dealt with the case, the horror of the original discovery was quickly overtaken by a sense of impotence as corrupt local officials frustrated their efforts to prosecute those involved. 'We had to move the women four times in 10 days to different secret safe houses because the traffickers kept turning up outside,' says Fredric Larrson, programme manager with the International Organisation for Migration in Sarajevo. Their persistence paid off. Faced with constant harassment, four of the five women prepared to testify against the slavers withdrew their evidence and the case collapsed. International officials have no question about how the women were so easily found. 'We have very strong indications,' said one official familiar with the case, 'that the authorities collude in both the trafficking of people and smuggling in illegal immigrants at the very highest level.' The case of the Prijedor women, say officials, is simply the starkest evidence of the difficulties they face in trying to stamp out human trafficking in Bosnia: the large-scale involvement of corrupt politicians and police. Prosecutions have been almost non-existent for both crimes; detection is hampered by those willing to help the people-smugglers. Among those named to The Observer by international officials as suspected of benefiting from the trade in migrants is the son of one of Bosnia's most respected figures. One senior official said: 'His company was organising special charter flights full of Iranians last year who simply disappeared. Do I think he is involved? I believe at least that he has benefited from it. The truth,' he continued, 'is that this is being encouraged by corruption at the very highest levels.' Evidence exists too that the smuggling business is part of a sophisticated international network that supplies forged documents as well. In some cases the trail leads to Britain. Late last year, say international police, a package was intercepted from London addressed to an Iranian woman renting accommodation in Sarajevo. Instead of the CDs it claimed to contain, the package was stuffed with stolen European passports. The shocking reality of Bosnia today, international officials say, is this. Five years after the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed to bring a genocidal war to an end, a country that has received unprecedented military and economic aid from the international community has turned, not into a model Balkan democracy, but into one of Europe's main hubs for smuggling people. 'It is depressing as hell,' said one official. 'Almost half the people in Sarajevo depend on the international community for their income, but we can't persuade the authorities to stamp it out. It would be easy if the international community was really bothered. We could simply say stop this or we stop the aid.' It is a threat already levelled against Yugoslavia, blamed for years under the Milosevic regime of being the main conduit of Chinese migrants into Europe. Late last year the EU told President Vojislav Kostunica that aid to his country is contingent on him closing the door to the tens of thousands of Chinese illegal immigrants using Belgrade as a first stop on their route into the EU. It is a solution many international officials believe should be applied to shock Bosnia's corrupt politicians out of their complacency. But they do not blame Bosnia alone. 'We are very concerned over what Europe is going to do about this problem,' says Geoffrey Beaumont. 'They say they are worried about this, but is their solution to seal off Bosnia from Europe?' So far, he concedes, there is little danger of that. The State Border Service he is helping to set up is 'so far working at only four of Bosnia's 400-odd border crossings. International funding for the project has been woeful. At present we have a budget of around #6 million to control all of Bosnia's borders. If Europe was serious about controlling this problem all it would cost the individual governments would be around #3m a year. That must be cheaper than the money that they are spending on detecting, arresting, holding and returning illegal refugees. So far the only people who are really trying hard on this issue are the Germans and the Dutch.' The alternative is a solution that is quickly becoming the EU's most controversial issue: a proposed scheme of managed migration into Europe via quotas and a 'green card' entry scheme similar to that in the US. Floated last December in a European Commission communication, it calls for a Europe-wide asylum and immigration policy that would abandon three decades of a zero migration policy in response to predictions of a declining and ageing European population that will need mass migration to sustain its economic life. What that would mean, according to the EU justice and home affairs Commissioner, Antonio Vitorino, involved in drawing up the paper, is a policy aimed at trebling legal migration to almost one million by 2004. But despite evidence collected by the Commission, the idea of a permit system for unskilled labourers like Wahab is unlikely to be smiled on by politicians in Britain or elsewhere. For although Britain's Home Office Minister, Barbara Roche, has been persuaded of the need to attract skilled migrants, no one has been persuaded of the case of those at the bottom of the ladder. It is a contradiction that has been noted by Sarah Spencer, director of the Citizenship and Governance programme of the Institute for Public Policy Research, who has been advising the Home Office on any change to its migration policy. 'One of the questions that has yet to be addressed is that, if we had legal channels into Britain and Europe, would it reduce the pressure to come in and dissuade people from going to the smugglers? That is a very sensitive issue. At the moment we have got a consensus that we need skilled labourers. We need to extend that consensus to a similar need for unskilled labourers of the kind currently coming in illegally.' Last week in Bosnia there was little room for optimism. The biggest success in the fight against the migrant trade in the past year was the international community persuading Iran to impose visas on its visitors to Bosnia, barring 25,000 Iranian migrants who passed through last year. They know there is little room for complacency. How little room exactly was revealed last week when The Observer visited a travel agency in the back streets of Aksaray, in Istanbul's old city. In the windows of local travel agents, signs advertise 'Visas'. In a back room of one small hotel, a woman from the Caucasus runs what is clearly a profitable business. We are introduced by a mutual acquaintance, and ask whether she can help an Iranian friend get to Bosnia. She asks a few questions in return, and sounds a little suspicious. 'Why Bosnia?' 'He has relatives there.' 'When does he want to go?' 'As soon as he can.' Finally she picks up the phone to call a contact: the man with the visas. She says a visa and a ticket for Bosnia can be ready the following day for $1,000. 'Does your friend want to go further?' she asks. 'Perhaps.' 'That can also be arranged, but it will cost much more.' Observer _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
