Smuggler or Rescuer?

After East and West Germany signed a Transit agreement in 1971, people trying to escape across the Berlin Wall were less likely to use subterranean tunnels than to conceal themselves in food trucks or rental vans as they passed through checkpoints. Some were helped by friends or family but more turned to professionals, who charged as much as 45,000 marks for their expertise in smuggling people over the border.

The East German authorities searched vehicles for stowaways and handed out stiff prison sentences to Fluchthelfer, who were vilified as criminal traffickers. In the West, however, they were popular heroes to whom the authorities largely turned a blind eye. In 1977, the Federal Court of Justice ruled that they had the right to charge for their services. In 2012, fifteen smugglers received the Order of Merit, Germany’s highest civic honour, for their services to freedom during the Cold War. The Jewish resistance hero Lisa Fittko, who led hundreds of refugees across the high passes of the Pyrenees in the early 1940s, received the award in 1986.

In June this year, the migrant rights group Borderline Europe held an awards ceremony to celebrate Fittko’s legacy and her modern day successors. In a small community theatre not far from the Wall’s route, migrants and activists spoke in person or by videolink about facing smuggling charges. A Tunisian fisherman who saved dozens of people from a capsized boat was arrested on arrival at an Italian port and later imprisoned. A Moroccan dissident who fled a crackdown on the 20 February Movement was jailed for more than a year in Greece, accused of smuggling the group – including his brother – that he had crossed the Evros river with on a leaky rubber boat.

In Poland, one activist explained, simply giving directions to migrants passing through the swamps and forests on the Belarusian border could result in criminal charges; unlike in the south, where giving help to fleeing Ukrainians has become a point of national pride. ‘People were smiling, welcoming us and treating us as heroes, while 200 kilometres up north we were called traitors and enemies and Putin’s spies,’ she said. The main award of the night was given to the daughter of Homayoun Sabetara, a 58-year-old Iranian serving an 18-year sentence for smuggling in Greece. In 2021 Sabetara fled Iran for Germany, where his daughters live, and was arrested driving a car with several undocumented passengers across the border from Turkey. He said he had been coerced into taking the wheel by the actual smuggler.

In 2015, the EU Commission said the ‘fight against smuggling’ was a priority in its migration strategy. The rhetoric of European leaders separates criminal gangs from the vulnerable people they exploit, allowing the EU to criminalise irregular migration and asylum-seeking while maintaining a façade of liberal values. But in the dim light of Europe’s borderlands, the difference between rescuer, smuggler, migrant and border guard is anything but clear.

A report published by Borderline Europe last month offers a bracing account of what passes for justice in Greece, where the arrival of every car and boat with irregular migrants marks the beginning of an investigation that will designate a smuggler among them. The people who arrange the passage rarely take the risk of crossing borders themselves, so it is often migrants who are held responsible and punished by the laws supposed to protect them. Third-country nationals charged with or convicted of people smuggling now make up almost one-fifth of Greece’s prison population; half of them are serving sentences of fifteen years or more.

Those arrested are frequently beaten or denied food and water, offered poor legal and translation support, and subject to lengthy pre-trial detention in overcrowded facilities. In the dozens of trials observed by Borderline Europe, no photographs, video recordings or financial records were entered as evidence: the prosecution relied instead on the testimony of one or two witnesses or police officers. Someone might be accused on the basis of their nationality or mother tongue, their proximity to a boat’s tiller, or for no apparent reason at all. Trials are often perfunctory. One, which resulted in a sixteen-year sentence and a €60,000 fine, lasted only six minutes.

Irregular border crossings into Europe have risen this year, though remain far from their 2015 peak. Since then, pushbacks – a coercive and illegal form of frontier crossing that has become integral to the EU’s border regime – have dramatically increased, most notably from Poland, Italy and Greece. The shipwreck of the Adriana in June claimed almost as many lives in minutes as the Inner German border did in 28 years. Frontex, Europe’s border agency, immediately blamed smugglers for the disaster. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister, responded to the disaster by praising the police, coastguard and armed forces for reducing the number of migrants arriving on Greek islands.

Yet several witnesses said the Greek coastguard was trying to tow the boat out of its waters when it capsized. The Adriana’s voyage began near Tobruk in eastern Libya, where militias aligned to the warlord Khalifa Haftar carry out not only smuggling operations but also EU-approved pushbacks. A Greek prosecutor brought charges of trafficking, organised crime and causing a shipwreck against nine Egyptian survivors. The men deny the accusations and say that they too had paid smugglers for their passage to Italy.