Correction: My Short Comment On "A brother’s duty-Behind the refugee crisis, families in the West willing to pay and pay"

ROME – One Tuesday night in June 2015, Tesfom Mehari Mengustu, an Eritrean delivery man in Albany, New York, got a call from a number he did not recognise. On the line was Girmay, his 16-year-old brother.

Girmay was calling from Libya. He had just spent four days crossing the Sahara. God willing, he said, the men who had smuggled him through the desert would get him to the capital city of Tripoli within days. After that, he would cross the Mediterranean for Italy.

“Europe is within reach,” Girmay told his brother. But he needed money to pay for the next leg of his journey.

Tesfom, 33, was less enthusiastic. Four years earlier, he had paid $17,000 in ransom to free another brother who had been kidnapped crossing Egypt’s Sinai desert. On another occasion, he had sent $6,000 to a smuggler holding his sister hostage in Sudan. War-torn Libya, Tesfom knew, was particularly dangerous. That April, Islamic State militants there had executed 30 Ethiopians and Eritreans and posted the videos online.

Of those lucky enough to survive the desert trek, many never make it to Europe.

“You will either drown in the sea or die in the desert,” Tesfom had already warned his little brother. “Or worse still, someone will slaughter you like a lamb on your way there. I can’t let you do this to our mother.

But Tesfom also knew his hands were tied. Girmay might be tortured by smugglers if he didn’t pay. He agreed to send the money and told his brother to call back with instructions. For weeks, none came. The phone Girmay had used went dead. By mid-July, a few weeks after Reuters began tracking Girmay’s odyssey, Tesfom doubted he would ever see his brother again.

Tesfom’s months-long effort to shepherd his brother into Europe — via payments that spanned at least four countries, three different bank accounts, and the use of three different kinds of money transfers — reveals the inner workings of the multi-billion-euro smuggling networks that are fuelling Europe’s migrant crisis.

Europol, Europe’s police agency, says people-smuggling may have generated between $3 billion and $6 billion last year. Most of the money for passage is raised and transferred by migrants’ and refugees’ relatives around the world.

The smuggling rings exploit captive consumers thousands of miles apart – migrants on a quest for freedom or opportunity, and their families back home and in the West, who are willing to pay to ensure their loved ones make it.  

Interviews with nearly 50 refugees, two smugglers and European prosecutors – as well as a review of documents released by Italian and European Union authorities – detail a sophisticated system built on an elaborate chain of dealers in Africa and Europe. The business relies on a trust-based exchange to transfer money without inviting scrutiny. Smugglers offer enticing group deals, such as one free crossing for every 10. During the summer’s high season, prices soar. A single boat crossing on the Mediterranean cost $2,200 per passenger in August, up from an average $1,500 a year earlier, according to refugees’ accounts.

Governments and law enforcement officials across Europe are trying to stop the smugglers. Europol says it and its partners have identified nearly 3,000 people since March 2015 who are involved in the smuggling trade. Italian police alone have arrested more than two dozen people whom prosecutors in Palermo believe helped organise thousands of boat trips between Libya and Sicily.

Girmay’s Journey

 

Intro

Four months to Europe

Girmay Mengustu, 16, fled Eritrea alone in May 2015 and crossed the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea to get to Europe. His journey took him through at least six countries, ending in Sweden in September. Step through the parts to follow his journey.

Sicilian prosecutor Calogero Ferrara has named two men – Ermias Ghermay, an Ethiopian, and Medhanie Yehdego Mered, an Eritrean – as kingpins in an organised-crime network responsible for bringing thousands of refugees to Italy. The men, Ferrara alleges, control an operation that is “much larger, more complex and more structured than originally imagined” when he began looking into smugglers. Both suspects are still at large.

Ferrara says the kingpins are opportunistic, purchasing kidnapped migrants from other criminals in Africa. They are also rich. By his calculations, each boat trip of 600 people makes the smugglers between $800,000 and $1 million before costs. Another smuggler whose activities Ferrara has been investigating made nearly $20 million in a decade.

Smugglers cut costs to maximise profit. They use cheap, disposable boats, dilapidated and rarely with enough fuel. They bank on Europe’s search and rescue missions. Some 150,000 people were saved in one year by an Italian naval operation that was launched in late 2013, according to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. It was suspended in late 2014 to save money and has been replaced by a more restricted European operation.

If a human cargo does go down, the smugglers’ losses are minimal.

“There is no risk for the business,” Ferrara said. “If you traffic in drugs and you lose the drug, somebody must pay for the drug. If (the migrants) sink and most of them die, there is no money lost.”

So far, the networks have mostly eluded law enforcement because they are based on anonymous cells spread across many countries. Neither the refugees seeking smugglers’ services nor the families footing the bill are interested in drawing attention to how the networks operate. Girmay himself declined to be interviewed for this story.

STRAINED FINANCE

Girmay was 2 years old when Tesfom last saw him in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital. It was 2001, a decade after the country had won independence. Following a border war with Ethiopia that started in 1998, the Eritrean government had declared a state of emergency and indefinitely extended national service. Tesfom, conscripted right out of high school, deserted, borrowed 30,000 nakfa (nearly $1,900) and paid smugglers to get him to Sudan. After he left, authorities jailed his father, a school teacher, for eight months and fined him the equivalent of $3,000. Tesfom was later arrested in Egypt and sent back to Eritrea.

REST: Eritrean asylum seekers in Wad Sharifey camp in Sudan, October 2015. REUTERS/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

Hundreds of thousands of Eritreans have fled in the past decade, making them the fourth-biggest group of refugees to enter Europe last year after Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis, according to the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR. The Eritrean migrants interviewed for this story paid an average $5,400 each for the journey in the second half of last year. That’s nearly eight times the World Bank’s estimate of annual per capita income in Eritrea.

A United Nations report in June 2015 described Eritrea as a “country where individuals are routinely arbitrarily arrested and detained, tortured, disappeared or extrajudicially executed.” The U.N. accused the government of gross human rights violations that “may constitute crimes against humanity.”

Girma Asmerom, Eritrea’s ambassador to the U.N., said that was a “sweeping statement (that) does not reflect the reality in Eritrea.”  

In an interview in New York, Asmerom said people were moving to escape poverty. He blamed Western nations for encouraging Eritreans to leave by offering them instant asylum. The motive of these nations, he said, was to weaken and marginalise the Eritrean government in order to serve their geopolitical interests.

“The Europeans and the Americans are contributing to this dynamic of human trafficking and misery,” he said.

Tesfom tells another story. After his forced return to Eritrea, he says, he served three years in prison for desertion, locked in a windowless dungeon for half of that time. He was then sent to fight in a border skirmish with the tiny coastal state of Djibouti. He deserted again, only to be held in Djibouti for over two years as a prisoner of war. In 2010, gaunt and gravely ill, he was granted refuge in the United States after human rights activists campaigned for asylum for Eritrean war prisoners. That August, he flew to Albany to start a second life.

In his new home, Tesfom spent hours in online chat rooms talking to other Eritrean dissidents and attended rallies in Washington and New York trying to draw attention to the plight of his compatriots.

Despite the distance separating him from his family, he says he still feels responsible for his siblings’ well-being. In 2011, his brother Habtay tried to emigrate to Israel but was kidnapped for ransom and tortured by nomads in the Sinai desert. Tesfom negotiated with middlemen to obtain his release. Habtay is now 25 and lives in Israel.

Exit from Eritrea: Seeking asylum in Europe

Since 2008, the number of Eritreans seeking refuge in Europe has increased about five-fold. They ranked second among asylum-seekers by 2014.  Germany was the top European destination for Eritreans in 2014. By October 2015, the latest figures available, 42,460 Eritreans had sought asylum in Europe, 270 more than in the same period in 2014. That made them the fourth-largest group.

Select a country in the dropdown to see how Eritreans compare with other asylum seekers  You can use the filter option on the left to see a country's applications as a percentage of all asylum requests to Europe. Clicking on the bars at bottom will show where migrants seek refuge.

Tesfom’s sister Sara, 20, hired a smuggler in Eritrea who brought her to Sudan, raised the price of her journey six-fold, then threatened to sell her to a nomadic tribe. Tesfom paid $6,000 to send her to Ethiopia, where she lives as a refugee.

The payoffs strained Tesfom’s finances. He says he was working 70 hours a week delivering pizzas and driving a delivery truck, to make little more than the rent and insurance fees on his Nissan Altima. He didn’t expect to be on the hook for another sibling’s escape.

But in late 2014, Girmay was thrown in jail after he dropped out of high school to evade national service. In May last year, he escaped and slipped into Sudan.

For most Eritreans aiming for Europe, Sudan is the first major stop. One way to get there is via refugee camps in northern Ethiopia. Thousands of Eritreans pass through these camps every month, according to the UNHCR. From there, travellers pay up to $1,600 to get to Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.

Girmay took a different route, across Eritrea’s western border to the Shagarab refugee camp in eastern Sudan. From there, he called his parents to ask for money to pay smugglers who could get him past checkpoints on the road to Khartoum.

“My father was distraught,” Tesfom said. “He told me, ‘I should have never let you leave. I could have had all my children here with me.’”

Tesfom was angry, too, but he couldn’t leave his brother stranded. He got a friend in Sudan to buy $200 in pre-paid cell phone minutes and text the code to his brother. Pre-paid mobile minutes are used as currency in many parts of Africa, especially in places where banks are scarce or mistrusted. Girmay could easily exchange the minutes for cash.

Then, Tesfom called Girmay and urged him to join their sister in Ethiopia. Girmay had his heart set on Europe. The brothers fought over the phone.

“If you listen to me, I’ll help you,” Tesfom chided his brother. “If you don’t, you’ll be on your own just as you were when you left home.”

At first, Tesfom thought he had won the argument. He agreed when Girmay asked him to send money to Khartoum, the financial hub through which much of the money in the trade is routed.

The main payment system for smugglers in Khartoum is hawala. Hawala depends on close personal relationships between people often separated by vast distances. There are no signed contracts, and few transactions are recorded in ledgers.

Instead, an agent, often in a Western country, accepts a deposit and calls or emails a counterpart in Khartoum to say how much money has been received. The agent in Khartoum then pays out that sum to the person being sent the money, minus a transaction fee and often at a better exchange rate than a bank would offer. The two agents eventually settle their transactions through banks. Although informal, it is a legal way of transferring money and is most used by Asian and African immigrants in the West. Italian investigators say smugglers use hawala transfers for 80 percent of their transactions.

In late May, Tesfom withdrew $1,720, all that was left in his Bank of America account, and went to a Sudanese hawala agent in Schenectady, New York. The agent kept $120 in service fees and told his counterpart in Khartoum that a deposit had been made in New York. The man in Khartoum then paid Girmay 8.30 Sudanese pounds for every dollar, 40 percent better than what banks were offering that day.

It is not clear whether the agent in Schenectady, whom Tesfom declined to identify, or others in the business are knowing or unwitting participants in the smuggling trade.

“The agents provide the service with no moral judgment. What people eventually do with the money is up to them,” said Gianluca Iazzolino, a University of Edinburgh researcher who studies Somali hawala networks in Nairobi.

Once Girmay had the money, according to his brothers, he searched for a smuggler in Khartoum and found a man named Tsegay. Middlemen like Tsegay, who often go by their first name to shield their identity, are trusted by refugees trying to cross the Sahara. They work with Sudanese and Libyan partners who have cleared the route ahead. Their best asset is a reputation – deserved or otherwise – as honest men and women who speak the languages of the people they serve, share the same religion, and often hail from the same towns and villages. They hire people called “feeders” to advertise their safety records and to recruit new arrivals.

The feeders usually work in businesses, such as home rentals and catering, that are likely to bring them into contact with new arrivals. They promote smugglers, who pay them a retainer fee, and set up deals between refugees and smugglers. Sometimes, they hold smugglers’ fees in escrow until refugees reach Libya. Recent refugees, in fact, say they only dealt with feeders and never negotiated directly with smugglers.

In Khartoum, Tsegay arranged for Girmay and 300 others to cross into Libya for $1,600 a person. On the edge of the desert, the refugees were handed over to Libyan smugglers, Girmay told his brother on the phone.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) says the Sahara crossing is at least as deadly as the Mediterranean, although most incidents go unreported. Some refugees fall off their trucks and are left behind as their column races through the desert. Accidents are common. But the biggest problem is dehydration.

“For two days and one night we had no food and no water,” said Gebreselassie Weush, an Eritrean refugee interviewed in Catania, Italy, after he crossed the Sahara in August. “We had to drink our own urine.”

Gunmen prowl the desert looking for human chattel. One Eritrean asylum seeker in Germany said tribesmen kidnapped his group and sold him for $500 to a military chief in Sabha, Libya. He was tortured for months because his family could not afford the $3,400 ransom the chief demanded. The women in his group, he said, were raped every time they were sold to a new owner. He escaped when fighting broke out in the city.