With the end of the 78 day war between NATO and Yugoslavia, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians may have returned home, but a new refugee crisis has followed. During the summer, the British Helsinki Human Rights Group conducted several on-the-spot observation missions in Dover, Calais and south-eastern Italy to analyze the complex and controversial issues of political asylum, migration, and the role of the mafia in people smuggling.
Real Refugees, the Abuse of Asylum and Organized Crime
With the end of the 78 day war between NATO and Yugoslavia, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians may have returned home, but a new refugee has crisis followed. The flow of would-be asylum seekers claiming to be from Kosovo and trying to enter EU states has not stopped. During the summer several European countries reported an upsurge in the number of refugees arriving and seeking asylum, notably Great Britain, Germany, France and Italy. During the summer, the British Helsinki Human Rights Group conducted several on-the-spot observation missions in Dover, Calais and south-eastern Italy to analyze the complex and controversial issues of political asylum, migration, and the role of the mafia in people smuggling.
The summer of 1999 has seen a spate of incidents reported in the media without adequate analysis.
In Dover, on the south coast of England, tensions flared between local youths and asylum seekers that resulted in several people being wounded in knife attacks.
In Calais, on the other side of the English Channel, refugees claiming to be from Kosovo, put up an ersatz camp in the city's main park to draw attention to their plight. It was cleared by the French riot police, the CRS.
Along the coast of Puglia in southern Italy hundreds of asylum seekers arrive every day, including gypsies from Kosovo. One boatload of would-refugees was apparently drowned at sea off Montenegro after been thrown overboard by the people smugglers. Added to which, hundreds of containers filled with humanitarian aid for Kosovo which should have been delivered by the state-sponsored charity Arcobaleno months ago have been discovered sitting at the port of Bari and in Durres in Albania.
Reports in both national and local newspapers in these countries have highlighted concerns that many refugees are not fleeing political persecution per se but seeking work and more favourable economic circumstances in the more affluent West. More alarmingly, police in Western Europe suspect that the influx of refugees is part of a worldwide network involving not just the smuggling of people but also the control of drug, prostitution and pedophile networks.
The subject has become a difficult one to discuss calmly as anyone who sets out to analyze the nature of the refugee problem tends to be labeled as 'racist'. Refusal to question anyone's motives however tends to tarnish the genuine asylum seekers and other honest would-be arrivals in Western Europe with the criminal brush since ordinary people are made cynical about the whole asylum issue by the refusal of self-appointed spokesmen for refugees to tackle the hard questions about people smuggling, crime and dishonest claims for asylum. This blanket denial of the grey side of the asylum issue ignores the reality that many refugees are themselves pawns in the hands of international criminals. The fact that most of them pay thousands of Deutsche Marks or dollars to reach Western Europe is testimony to the fact that asylum is big business for many unscrupulous people who have no concern for the fate of those whose passage to freedom they facilitate.
Having already visited the key port of embarkation for Italy in Albania, Vlore, in 1998, members of the BHHRG visited Dover, Calais and southern Italy in August-September, 1999, to examine the nature and extent of the problems there.
Their report concludes that:
(1) The definition of asylum contained in Article 14 (1) of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights - to offer protection to those suffering political persecution - is now largely irrelevant. Apart from a handful of people (see below) no one interviewed by the BHHRG claimed to have been persecuted politically; they wanted to work and gain a decent standard of living, better than they could hope for in the countries of origin. These are not dishonorable motives, but to achieve asylum status applicants must dissemble their true economic motives and invent political or religious reasons.
(2) Attempts to strengthen and refine domestic methods of applying asylum laws will do little to curtail the flow. Despite much-vaunted cooperation between EU member states and legislation like the Dublin Convention the understanding is that 'the problem' can be shifted from one EU country to another.
(3) The rationale behind the existence of bodies like the Council of Europe is blown open. For example, people from Romania and Poland are considered suitable candidates for asylum despite those countries having met the human rights criteria for membership in the Council of Europe.
(4) Many of the problems that now exist have resulted from ill-conceived foreign policy decisions made by the Europeans and their more powerful American allies in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, in particular. This has involved promoting and supporting patently mafia regimes which, when once established, are impossible to control. KFOR's hopeless attempts to stem Kosovar Albanian violence in the past 3 months demonstrates this all too well.
BHHRG has long experience of studying mafia activities in the FRY republic of Montenegro and in Albania. According to all the experts in Italy, Albania is the outlet for most of the people smuggling that is now taking place. However, when former president Berisha attempted to control smugglers in October, 1996, his government was brought down in 1997 by an uprising led by a strange alliance of mafia gangs and former Communists with, many believed, covert American help, certainly with vocal support from EU and US capitals. Since then Albania's role as exporter of people and organized crime to Italy and beyond has exploded despite the Tirana government's signature on cooperation agreements especially with Italy. Unlike Albania, the West's ally in Yugoslavia, President Milo Djukanovic of Montenegro has refused even to sign anti-mafia and anti-smuggling agreements with Italy.
It is a sad irony that NATO's humanitarian crusade in the Balkans has promoted a refugee exodus and an explosion of organized crime. The human rights of hundreds of millions inside and outside the EU are threatened by the failure to control international organized crime and its political backers especially in the Balkans.