by Matteo Tacconi
April 1st, 2011
Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine: turbulent, restless lands, where conflicts and revolutions take place continuously. Lands where there seems to be no future, harassed by poverty and misery. People tend to leave these lands. Sometimes they leave on their own will, in order to find and build a new, better life for themselves. Sometimes, they are forced to leave because of political reasons.
You go West, where else? You escape throughout Turkey, because between the East and the West there is Anatolia. A real boon for Turkish Mafia. These criminals carefully follow the trends of criminal markets and have happily rushed headlong into this promising business.
Figures show that the trafficking of migrants generates sky-rocketing profits for criminal gangs operating in this sector. Researcher Koulani Vasiliki wrote in her paper (Human Smuggling and Trafficking in Turkey), published in July 2009 by the Research Institute for European and American Studies of Athens) that over 200 thousand migrants enter Turkey illegally each year and one out of four relies on the help of the criminal network to enter the country and exit it, making their way to Europe, paying on average 1500-2000 dollars.
If these figures prove true, it turns out that smuggling generates from 75 to 100 million dollars every twelve months. Probably even a little more if you consider that these figures were provided by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in 2003, and definitely need to be updated.
The majority of migrants, mostly Iranians, Iraqis and Afghans but also many Turkish citizens decide to leave with the help of criminal networks, are trafficked, like heroin, mainly on the Turkish-Iranian border; it is from this border that the bulk of migrants arrive in Anatolia. This is due both to the characteristics of this border, which has traditionally been devoted to smuggling (heroin, weapons, gasoline and even livestock) and to the fact that other limes, especially the Turkish-Iraqi border, are more heavily militarized.
Immigrants are first gathered in the border town of Van. From there, traffickers lead them to Istanbul, making some intermediate stops along the route in various places; from Istanbul, migrants are then taken to Edirne, near the border with Europe. However, unlike the heroin trade, smugglers accompany their "freight" (this is what migrants are for traffickers) usually to Greece, less often to Bulgaria.
As estimated by Migreurop, a French association monitoring large migration flows, 150 thousand people a year try to make it into the Community territory from the Turkish-Greek border. How?
Traffickers make migrants wade across River Evros, marking the border between the two states. This can be done by foot, especially in the summer months, during which some stretches of the river are dry. Usually, however, the river is crossed aboard small and crumbling boats crammed with men and women.
You enter from Iran; you exit from Greece. But how does this whole "machine" for the smuggling of migrants work? Professor Ahmet İçduygu, a demography and migration expert who teaches at Koç University in Istanbul, outlined the profile of this “migration-machine” in a 2004 piece of research on migrant trafficking between Turkey and Greece published in the journal “Southeast European and Black Sea Studies,” under the title “Transborder Crime Between Turkey and Greece: human smuggling and its regional consequences.”
Professor İçduygu maintains that the trafficking of people to Europe via Turkey is based on a Ford-type assembly line, involving small groups of traffickers (the so-called kaçakçılar), each of which ensures the passage of migrants from one border to the other, from one city to another city. Traffickers’ groups in Van are in contact with Iranian groups, with whom they manage border crossing.
Later on, they bring the migrants into some other cities of Anatolia, hand them over to some other group which, in turn, takes care of transportation and hands them over to İstanbul criminal cells, which in the same way carry out the transfer of migrants to Edirne or elsewhere along the Turkish-Greek border, where local traffickers are in charge of organizing the border crossing. Once this border is crossed, if everything goes off smoothly, it is up to the Greek smugglers to play their part and so on, all along the Balkans or across the Mediterranean, with Europe as the final destination.
Just as in heroin smuggling, in the European territory the Turkish Mafia can rely on alliances with foreign criminal groups and with local branches of Turkish criminal groups rooted within the Turkish communities in EU countries.
There are two types of migrant smugglers’ cells in Turkey. Sometimes they are linked to a well-structured and specialized organization, a subsidiary of one of the large cupolas of the Turkish Mafia. Sometimes the cell is independent, acting only on its own behalf and placing itself in the international trafficking of migrants spontaneously, and just as spontaneously, the cell might leave the migrant trafficking market once it has achieved its goals. In this case, it might be replaced by another small organization taking the stage.
Each group of traffickers also has a clear division of labor. There are those in charge of forging false identity papers and visas, those who provide apartments and buildings where migrants are temporarily sheltered, those in charge of finding vehicles or vessels for the transport, the cashiers, those providing cellular phones and guaranteeing contacts with the organization in charge of taking over the migrants at the next step... The organization, in other words, is perfect. The machine is well-oiled and tested and generates amazing income.
Among major Turkish groups operating in this sector of the economy, the Mafia of Aksaray, a district in the European neighborhood of Istanbul, stands out. Until the late 1990s and the beginning of the next decade, Aksaray traffickers directly organized the travel of migrants by sea toward the Italian coasts, especially Puglia and Calabria. Now, as coastal patrolling grew more intense and the risks grew higher, traffickers prefer to carry migrants to Edirne, and from there to Greece. However, as Paola Monzon stated in her 2008 working paper “The smuggling of migrants by sea to Italy” for the Centre for International Political Studies (CESP), the route carrying migrants from Turkey to Calabria is being used again, although not as intensely as in old times, when Muammer Küçük ruled over the whole Mediterranean basin and organized regular huge landings of refugees and illegal immigrants on Italy’s Southern coasts.
When Küçük was arrested in Izmir in 2002, while he was preparing one of his “wrecks of the sea” carrying 200 people on board, each one of whom had been stripped of $2500, he was the almighty Turkish boss of migrant trafficking. Officially the owner of a phone shop in Istanbul, Küçük had gradually gained a leading role in this criminal sector: everyone had to pass through him sooner or later, everyone had to come to terms with him. Küçük accumulated a huge capital, estimated at eight million Euros. He could have collected an immense capital if the Turkish police, after lengthy investigations carried out with the help of police branches of Crotone and Reggio Calabria, had not caught him with his hands in the cookie jar in Izmir.
Smashing Muammer Küçük’s group was a big success. But not the only one. In recent years, authorities have achieved good results in the fight against migrant traffickers, thanks to tighter border controls and more intense judicial activity. But the traffic always goes on and generates significant profits for those who control it. It seems that lately Kurdish groups, counting on a large basin of immigration inside Kurdistan and, like the Turkish Mafia, on the help of criminal cells nested within the Kurdish Diaspora in Europe, have gained an increasingly important role on this front, achieving a dominant position and challenging the primacy of the Aksaray Mafia.
The Aksaray groups, however, remain powerful and have imposed a near-monopoly in another sector: prostitution. It is estimated that thousands of women are enslaved by the baba and forced to suffer the cynical logic of the sex industry. Many of these women are from former Soviet republics: mostly from Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Moldova. Other women come from Iran and the Middle East. They are recruited in their home countries by local Mafia and sold to criminal organizations in Turkey, where they become the exclusive property of Turkish criminal groups. Therefore, not only migrants are smuggled.
In Turkey there is also trafficking of human beings. That is, there are migrants who remain in the country and end up in the tangle of Mafias. Among these unfortunate human beings, apart from women, there are also many irregular migrants, employed as seasonal workers in fields or as low-cost workers in factories. They live in precarious, sometimes sub-human, conditions. They live as slaves.
Other kinds of trafficking
Not only heroin. Even if the so-called ”brown sugar” is the most trafficked drug, other kinds of drugs are also trafficked in the Turkish territory. Allegedly, the newest trend in drug smuggling is cocaine. Recently, the police have seized increasing amounts of this kind of drug. According to some experts’ opinions, Turkish criminal groups have begun to carry cocaine to the markets of the Middle East, where demand is increasing, especially in cities like Beirut. However, internal consumption too absorbs a certain amount of the cocaine flow. Sometimes, traffickers may even trade a haul of cocaine in exchange for a certain amount of heroin.
The alliance between Turkish and Balkan drug lords plays a vital role in cocaine trafficking. Indeed, the Balkan drug lords are carving out a niche in this increasingly important market. Bulgarian and Romanian traffickers stand out, due to the fact that Bulgarian and Romanian ports (according to the Octa report by Europol, with Constanţa playing an increasingly important role) are cocaine "storage facilities:" cocaine is crammed into the holds of commercial vessels and transported by sea to Istanbul. From Istanbul, cocaine is then channeled on the roads of Anatolia, toward the border with Syria, the main transport corridor of drugs destined to the Middle East.
Turkey is also a transit country for ecstasy (391 thousand tablets seized in 2009) and synthetic drugs produced in Europe, especially in the Eastern segment of the continent. According to the 2009 Tadoc dossier, these drugs are also traded for heroin on their way to the final destination. In this case too, the primary target market is the Middle East rather than domestic consumers.
The same can be said about amphetamine, trafficked on an even larger scale (nearly three million tablets seized in 2009). From Eastern Europe, amphetamine is carried to Turkey, where the bulk of the flow is then channeled via Syria to the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula, where demand is steadily growing, except a small portion of drugs that remains in Turkey.
Of course, among the drugs smuggled in Turkey there is cannabis, the most produced, trafficked, seized, and used drug in the world. In Turkey, especially in the South-East Anatolia area, cannabis is widely raised and the harvest, in exponential growth, is sufficient to meet the internal market’s demand; therefore, there is no need for import anymore. There are no more seizures at the border. According to the latest Tadoc report, however, a steadily increasing number of internal seizures have been made in the Turkish territory: 6 tons of cannabis were seized in 2005, 9.7 in 2006, 13.4 in 2007, 20.5 in 2008, and 25.7 in 2009.
Public opinion was amazed by a piece of news reported last summer on the discovery of a giant cannabis plantation in the village of Hasanbey (in the province of Van), where more than two billion plants were raised. It was the largest anti-marijuana operation ever undertaken in Turkey: the eradication operations required the work of hundreds of military for five consecutive days.
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