MIGRATION: Human smugglers profit as tragedies multiply
JOHANNESBURG, 12 July 2012 (IRIN) - When Abdo Giro*, a 55-year-old
evangelist minister and political dissident from southern Ethiopia, paid
smugglers 55,000 birr (US$3,095) to take him from the Kenyan border town of
Moyale to Johannesburg in South Africa, he was completely unprepared for the
ordeal that lay ahead.
"It was totally different from what they promised me," he told IRIN,
speaking through a translator.
Instead of the promised "nice car", he was lucky to end up in a packed
mini-bus for the first leg of the journey through Kenya and Tanzania. The
other half of his group of 76 fellow Ethiopians were hidden in a load of
wood in the back of a pick-up truck. The two vehicles took rough back roads
and travelled mainly at night to avoid detection. When they encountered
police, a bribe was paid and they were allowed to continue.
Before they reached the border with Malawi, Giro's smugglers unloaded the
migrants in an area of bush and left them there for five days without food
or water while they checked the route ahead.
"We shared the little water we had and ate leaves," recalled Giro. "Many of
us got sick from the heat and malaria; four people died while we were
there."
While Giro was hiding in the bush, another group of Ethiopian migrants using
a different smuggler were attempting to cross Lake Malawi. When their
overloaded boat capsized, 47 of the migrants drowned.
A week later, while Giro was struggling to breathe in the back of a packed
truck travelling through Mozambique, 42 Ethiopian migrants suffocated to
death in another truck travelling through central Tanzania. The driver
dumped the dead bodies on the side of the road along with 85 survivors and
drove on.
There were no deaths in the vehicle that Giro was travelling in, but 16 of
his group who were travelling in the vehicle loaded with wood died during
the journey.
"I sometimes don't sleep thinking about [them]," he said. "There should be
more laws to punish such inhumane individuals."
Hidden trade
The scale of the two tragedies in Malawi and Tanzania has thrown a spotlight
on the thriving and largely hidden human smuggling trade between the Horn of
Africa and South Africa, but they are unlikely to act as a deterrent for
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94279/ETHIOPIA-Cautionary-migration-tales-ar
e-no-deterrent> Ethiopians and Somalis wanting to escape conflict, political
oppression, drought and endemic poverty, who view South Africa as a land of
relative prosperity and freedom.
"For most Africans, South Africa is like the closest thing to Europe or
America and it's easier to get to," explained a member of the Ethiopian
Diaspora Development Association in Johannesburg who declined to be named.
"Many of them already have relatives here."
Smugglers are capitalizing on the demand for their services and the relative
impunity with which they operate by making increasing financial demands on
desperate migrants while showing little regard for their safety.
During the last leg of the journey, Giro's smugglers demanded an additional
US$2,400, citing the costs of bribes and food, despite having fed their
charges nothing but stale bread and water. The migrants were instructed to
call their friends and relatives in South Africa and tell them to have the
money ready. After arriving in Johannesburg Giro was kept at a house in the
suburb of Mayfair for another two days while his four cousins, who work as
informal traders, scraped together the cash to secure his release.
"It will be very tough to pay them back," sighed Giro who owes his relatives
another R2,000 ($244) for the bribe they paid a Home Affairs Department
official to secure him a one-month asylum seekers permit that is now about
to expire.
Border officials get tough
South Africa has taken steps in the past year to reduce the numbers of
asylum seekers flocking to the country. Border officials now routinely turn
away would-be asylum seekers who have transited through other countries
based on the principle that they should have sought asylum in the first
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/93403/AFRICA-Horn-migrants-heading-south-pus
hed-backwards> safe country they reached.
Christopher Horwood, coordinator of the Nairobi-based
<
http://www.regionalmms.org/index.php?id=38> Regional Mixed Migration
Secretariat, argues that such measures do little to curb the activities of
smugglers, but increase the risks for their clients.
"When borders and policies become more restrictive the unpleasant truth is
that migration doesn't stop, it merely adapts. [It] makes smugglers more
desperate to evade police and thereby take further risks with the men and
women in their boats, in their containers and misnamed `safe-houses'," he
said.
Last year, police in northern
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/93759/MOZAMBIQUE-TANZANIA-Horn-migrants-beat
en-deported-imprisoned> Mozambique responded to the large numbers of
Ethiopian and Somali migrants arriving on smugglers' boats from Mombasa by
intercepting the migrants and dumping them on the border with Tanzania where
they spent several months in jail before being repatriated.
Smuggler networks appear to have responded by simply changing their routes.
Following the drownings in Lake Malawi in mid-June, the UN Refugee Agency
(UNHCR) released a statement noting that the numbers of migrants and asylum
seekers arriving in Mozambique has decreased since last year while UNHCR's
country representative in Malawi, Caroline van Buren, told IRIN that there
has been a notable increase in Horn migrants transiting through Malawi in
the last three months. Groups of migrants are usually intercepted near the
border with Tanzania in Karonga District and detained by police until UNHCR
can send a team to determine those eligible for asylum who can be
transferred to Dzaleka refugee camp.
Read more
http://www.irinnews.org/images/design/page.gif
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94279/ETHIOPIA-Cautionary-migration-tales-ar
e-no-deterrent> ETHIOPIA: Cautionary migration tales are no deterrent
http://www.irinnews.org/images/design/page.gif
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/93759/MOZAMBIQUE-TANZANIA-Horn-migrants-beat
en-deported-imprisoned> MOZAMBIQUE/TANZANIA: Horn migrants beaten, deported,
imprisoned
http://www.irinnews.org/images/design/page.gif
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/93844/Analysis-Mixed-responses-to-mixed-migr
ation-in-Africa> ANALYSIS: Mixed responses to mixed migration in Africa
http://www.irinnews.org/images/design/page.gif
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/93403/AFRICA-Horn-migrants-heading-south-pus
hed-backwards> AFRICA: Horn migrants heading south "pushed backwards"
"Our budget has been depleted in the first few months of the year because
there are so many of these groups that have to be screened," said van Buren.
"If these are genuine asylum seekers they'd be allowed in [at the border],
but because there are smugglers involved they take a route across the lake
or through the bush."
A "low risk" business
Three Malawians are facing charges of manslaughter in connection with the
migrants who drowned in Lake Malawi, but convictions for smuggling are rare,
according to Horwood. Countries like Tanzania still lack specific laws
criminalizing human smuggling, while local law enforcement authorities are
often complicit in accepting bribes from smugglers in return for turning a
blind eye or even facilitating their activities.
"The business of smuggling and trafficking is one of high rewards and very
low risks," Horwood told IRIN. "The prosecution and conviction rates related
to aggravated smuggling and trafficking are dismal in Africa."
More often than not, he added, it is the migrants themselves who face rough
treatment and imprisonment when intercepted by authorities. According to the
International Organization for Migration, about 1,300 irregular migrants,
most of them from Ethiopia and Somalia, were being detained in Tanzania as
of March this year while a Kenyan newspaper recently reported that 190
Ethiopian nationals were doing jail time in Isiolo, a town in Kenya's
Eastern Province that is a stop off on the smuggling route from Moyale.
Faced with the debt he owes to his cousins and unsure how he will afford the
necessary bribes to renew his asylum seeker permit, let alone secure refugee
status, Giro said he now regrets taking so many risks to come to South
Africa.
"I'm trying to warn others in Ethiopia not to come, not to believe the
smugglers," he said.
*Not his real name
<
http://www.irinnews.org/photo/details.aspx?imageid=201111141156270234>
http://www.irinnews.org/images/2011/201111141156270234.jpg
Photo: <
http://www.irinnews.org/photo/> Kristy Siegfried/IRIN
Migrant casualties are mounting as smugglers take greater risks to evade
authorities
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Received on Thu Jul 12 2012 - 18:48:20 EDT
