Smugglers return to Greece after Balkan route closure

Right in front of the Thessaloniki train station, migrants gather to charge their cellphones for free at a small cafe. The owner told Deutsche Welle (DW) that the migrants are eager to find a way out of Greece in order to reach wealthy countries.

Well-dressed smugglers posing as tourists frequent the shop where migrants also eat for free, suggesting that the smugglers pay the owner for her generocity towards migrants. The “tourists” have heavy English accents yet they claim to be visiting “to be with other Afghans”. One could be seen in a nearby dark, abandoned building conversing urgently with an Afghan family sleeping in a tent.

This family had recently attempted to cross into Macedonia but were stopped by police and returned to Greece. The urgent conversation suggests that a deal was being struck by the two parties.

Migrants and refugees continue to head north through a number of illicit smuggling channels, passing under the radar of immigration officials and filling the coffers of criminal smuggling networks to the tune of tens of millions of euros, according to DW.

At least 10 000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared after arriving in Europe, according to the EU’s criminal intelligence agency. Europol. Many are feared to have fallen into the hands of organised trafficking syndicates.

In the first attempt by law enforcement agencies to quantify one of the most worrying aspects of the migrant crisis, Europol’s chief of staff Brian Donald, told the Observer in January this year that thousands of vulnerable minors had vanished after registering with state authorities.

Donald said 5000 children had disappeared in Italy alone, while another 1 000 were unaccounted for in Sweden. The agency has documented a disturbing crossover between organised gangs helping to smuggle people into the EU and human-trafficking gangs exploiting them for sex and slavery.

He told the Guardian that longstanding criminal gangs known to be involved in human trafficking, whose identity had been logged in the agency’s Phoenix database, were now being caught exploiting refugees.

“The ones who have been active in human smuggling are now appearing in our files in relation to migrant smuggling,” said Donald.

One high-ranking police official involved in efforts to combat human trafficking networks in Thessaloniki told DW that the trade was on the rise. “Following the closure of the Balkan route there was a period of relative calm, shall we say, while people waited to see what would happen, what the policies were going to be. Now in recent weeks we have seen a rise in arrests… There are active organizations and there are people who wish to be smuggled, it’s the law of supply and demand.”

It is difficult to gauge the number of people involved, the official says. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal citing European immigration officials stated that the whereabouts of as many as 13 000 migrants and refugees who had been registered in Greece, is currently unknown. The same article, citing unnamed Greek and European officials, claimed that about 500 per week were being smuggled over the northern border.

According to police to be smuggled from Thessaloniki to Belgrade usually costs at least between 800 and 1 300 euros per head. Another 1 500 euros is required to get into Germany. Often this money is not paid by the migrants directly but by their families through networks spread across multiple countries.

But trafficked children aged between six months and 10 years are bought and sold for sums ranging from €4,000 to €8,000, although amounts of up to €40,000 have been reported in some cases.

EU authorities only registered 15 846 victims of human trafficking in 2013-14, including 2 375 children, but the report’s authors believe the true number of victims is far higher.

When movement across the border was largely unimpeded, prices collapsed. But as the Balkan route has become more difficult, it has also become more lucrative for the smugglers. “The smugglers certainly celebrated,” the police official said of the closure of the Balkan route. “We heard from people involved in this that they were pleased because they would be better able to work.”

They are also notoriously difficult to contain. “We have observed that the networks, when they receive a major blow, they go quiet for a period of time. But we can’t say they stop. They reorganize themselves, they start recruiting other players, and this has to do with the law of supply and demand. This phenomenon will not stop as long as there are people who want to migrate, who want to leave their countries, due to wars, due to poverty,” the police official said.

These networks are unfortunately easily exploited by criminal and terror groups. “That these networks are used to send some fighters, that has been proven recently with the events in Paris,” the police official told DW.

“To put it very plainly it is always safer if we know who’s coming,” Dimitriadi says. “In order to know who’s coming, it always better if we can ‘choose’ also who that person will be. Why not make it legal? We can choose that. We can know who is coming. It will be safer for us and beneficial for them. It is a win win.”

Either way, the logic of open borders seem to prevail.