in Otranto have much to say about the scafisti. They will grudgingly admit how much they admire their skill; they will talk morosely about the difficulty of catching them and the leniency with which they are treated by the Italian courts. They think of them chiefly as ruthless profiteers who will put people’s lives at risk for gain. Since a clash in 1997 between an Italian coastguard boat and a large Albanian vessel, when around eighty or ninety migrants were drowned, the Guardia came under instructions to pursue smugglers only after they had delivered their passengers. The policy is not always observed, but most of the chases in the Channel take place when the scafisti are heading for home in empty boats.
A chase is dramatic and largely symbolic – another kind of contest between the cumbersome forces of the state and a more mobile, unencumbered enemy with few allegiances and no jurisdiction to defend. A Guardia boat can manage a top speed of sixty-five miles an hour. Its quarry is capable of slightly faster bursts, the prow riding up at a rampant angle to the water. Under a handheld searchlight beamed from the Guardia boat, you can see the outboards and the hooded drivers, but as you turn in on the gommone, it simply pirouettes in a flurry of spray and slides away. I was on a Guardia boat during one of these chases. The captain forced the gommone round several times, turning at full power, until it hit our wake, bouncing wildly over the ridge of ferment, baulking at a great ditch of water on the other side and recovering to steer for home. We made another approach, another turn, a fraction earlier than the last; the gommone thrashed across the bows at a tremendous pace and tore into the night; we altered course and picked it up again, pursuing, circling, almost engaging. Things went on in this way until we were halfway to Albania. But it was clear from the first confrontation that the Guardia were up against hopeless odds. In this bruising, violent but strangely abstract hunt, manoeuvrability has a clear advantage.
The organised smuggling of people from Albania is abetted in Puglia by the Sacra Corona Unità, one of Italy’s major criminal organisations, which also handles tobacco – now a Guardia priority (as it is for British customs) – and a proportion of the marijuana grown in Albania: the scafisti act as couriers. Elsewhere, ‘facilitators’ offer access to the rich world via lorry, train and sea container. Agents in Asia and Africa receive money for getting people into the high-security areas of airports so that they can stow away in the landing gear of aircraft and die. By the end of the 1990s it was thought that the number of young women being smuggled into the EU every year from the former Eastern bloc and trafficked into the sex trade was in the hundreds of thousands. It is not hard to see why the smugglers are vilified by governments, police and the press. They can foil the defences of the United States and Fortress Europe, carrying a criminal virus into the rich world, a sickness which has its origins – we like to suppose – thousands of miles away.
Some of the best information about smugglers comes from the people who have had to use them. In 1998 at the Centro Regina Pacis, a summer colony for children converted into short-term accommodation for people caught on the beaches, I was introduced to a young Kosovan called Fatmir. He had taught Albanian in a private school in his village; he was also a Kosovo Liberation Army supporter: fair game for the Serbians and a likely candidate for asylum under the terms of the Convention. Earlier that year, after his village was bombarded and the school burned down, he had joined an exodus of KLA from the province. They were heading for Albania. Fatmir took up with a contingent of about 400 fighters, followed by some 1,500 civilians. He walked for three days across the mountains, but encountered Serbian police at the border. Three of his party were killed. He now embarked on a ten-day detour, attempting another route into Albania, but this failed and he made the five-day journey on foot back across Kosovo and into Montenegro. There, he and his companions – four brothers and some cousins – paid 200 Deutschmarks each for a ride in a kombi down to Lake Shkodër. They paid another 50 DM each to be ferried across and, a month or more later, having arrived in Vlorë, a further 1,000 DM or so for passage on a gommone.
The agents who took his money for the last leg of the journey gave Fatmir the impression that he would be going straight up to Milan and, from there, through Switzerland to Germany on forged Italian documents. With him on the gommone were nine people from Kosovo. Most of the others were Albanians. The gommone was not detected and the passengers, around thirty of them, waded ashore in the dark, led by an Albanian agent carrying a bag of marijuana. They followed the agent through the dark into a coppice, hid until the police had called off a brief helicopter search, and after a seven-hour walk reached a ruined house in the countryside. The agent collected more money from all of the passengers and disappeared, instructing them to wait in the house: ‘A taxi will come and take you to Milan.’ After two hours, a small truck arrived and they wedged themselves inside, but they had only gone a few kilometres when the driver and his mate stopped the vehicle and threw all the Kosovans out. Fatmir and his companions walked to Lecce, thinking they might change some money and take a train north, but they were apprehended at the station and put on a boat back to Albania. Fatmir was returned because he was eager not to claim asylum: a number of people who could petition successfully would rather try to get through Italy undetected and lodge the claim in a neighbouring state, where they have a better network of expatriate contacts who can assist with lodgings, social services and, eventually, jobs. This kind of common sense on the part of asylum seekers is now disparaged by European governments as ‘asylum shopping’.
Fatmir’s second venture across the Channel some weeks later was a success. Once ashore, he simply went to a police station and announced that he was from Kosovo. He no longer had a Kosovo ID card: it had been removed by an Albanian official on his return from Italy (and sold, he was convinced, to an Albanian who could now pose as a Kosovan in order to claim asylum). He had spoken to dozens of other arrivals and discovered that it was quite common for agents to treat Kosovans – and Kurds – in the way they had treated him, first time around. The agents, he believed, wanted only to maximise their success rate. For Kurds and Kosovans to remain in Italy, it is normally enough for them to make their way to the police, as Fatmir did on his second run, and state their place of origin – which is why the agents could dump a group from Kosovo by the side of the road, and rob them, without jeopardising their own reputation as effective smugglers or the chances of their clients’ remaining in Italy. Albanians, on the other hand, are mostly economic migrants. The EU disapproves of them and, if caught, they are returned as a matter of course by the Italian authorities. For this group, more careful chaperoning by the agents is necessary. The alternative, for an Albanian, is to pose as a Kosovan refugee: Fatmir’s Kosovo ID card would have fetched a good deal of money, up in the hundreds of dollars, in Albania.
Human smuggling is one thing, and human trafficking another. The most concise definitions, based on the International Organisation for Migration’s guidelines, were offered in 2007 by Caroline Moorhead in the New York Review of Books: ‘Smuggled people have consented to travel and when they reach their destinations they expect to be free; the trafficked, even if they have initially consented, remain victims of continuing exploitation at the hands of their traffickers.’ Freedom of a kind – escape, safety, success or failure in a new life – is the fate of the smuggled migrant. Bonded labour or sex-trade slavery – answering to worldwide demand – is the fate of trafficked people, including minors; even legal work schemes can turn into forms of slavery in the under-regulated world of domestic service. Yet this clear-cut distinction between smugglers and traffickers is effectively blurred, because benign behaviour coexists with racketeering in the same smuggling organisations and even in the choices of individual smugglers, whether they are running boats across the Mediterranean or groups of Latinos up through Arizona. Offered a chance to profit from trafficking, a smuggler will often want to take it. This is a free market. Unauthorised migrants run risks of their own, and assess them to the best of their abilities. One year as a sex worker in Toledo, Ohio, or two as an unpaid construction worker on a corporate pyramid in Dubai: many unauthorised migrants have thought this through. The fog of slavery, where governments can shine no light, descends when the contract was supposed to end and didn’t.
In Puglia I became suspicious of the idea that smugglers were a modern embodiment of evil. I didn’t doubt their business acumen, or their lack of scruple with lives, or their incentive to traffic – a market incentive – but it was reasonable to assume there was another
