Smuggling of Migrants Becomes A More Serious Issue on The Balkan Route

Refugee crisis in the Western Balkans: Scenes of despair and hope. Photo taken in 2015 in Serbia (Photo: European Union/ECHO/Mathias Eick, Presevo, Serbia, November 2015)

In August 2024, the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, or GI-TOC, stated that despite economic advancements, the Western Balkans are still susceptible to this phenomenon and that efforts to combat it have not been successful. Albanian police reported Monday that they had arrested two people and confiscated weapons in connection with a 16-year-old Afghani who was allegedly trafficked and coerced into working at a car repair shop.

“They forcibly held a 16-year-old child from Afghanistan [suspected of being trafficked] to use him for work. Police handcuffed an 18-year-old and declared his brother wanted. The other brother and father of these citizens are also being processed [by police],” the police said.

The Lucrative Refugee Business Model

Escape is a billion-dollar business for the people smugglers. They cross border fences with false passports and on dangerous routes. With an undercover investigator, ‘Die Spur’ gives exclusive insights into the unscrupulous world of the human trafficking mafia. A trip across the border to Europe costs: the people smugglers demand between five and six thousand euros from the refugees.

The smugglers are extremely dangerous and their business is unscrupulously lucrative. One smuggler may earn €80,000 to €90,000 a month. In 2021, GI-TOC estimated the value of the people-smuggling market in the Balkans at more than 50 million euros a year.

The GI-TOC has conducted field research interviews with refugees, border police, border officials and with NGO staff in order to estimate the amount of fees paid to traffickers. According to their analysis, in 2020 the total amount paid by the refuges to smugglers in the Western Balkans was estimated to be €50.6 million. Roughly 19,000 migrants and refugees arrived in Italy via the Balkan Route 2023, according to preliminary data collated by the Italian Consortium of Solidarity, ICS, a Trieste-based rights organisation. That’s more than in 2022, when some 13,000 were registered.

Many claim that the main reason the Serbian migrant smuggling network prospers is widespread corruption, even though these cases are rarely looked into. There are rumors that the smugglers and certain local police officers have some sort of relationship. It is a transnational crime, and without the help of the local government, it hardly exists at all.

In the Autumn of 2023 a report by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) revealed how rival people-smugglers from Afghanistan, Morocco and Syria are arming themselves in northern Serbia to devastating effect, often with weapons supplied by Albanian crime gangs from Albania, Kosovo and southern Serbia. Previous reporting by BIRN has also exposed the collusion between such gangs and corrupt police officers.

The Dangerous Balkan Route

These gangs have clashed repeatedly, sometimes fatally, in another sign of how brazenly they defend demarcated territory.

The Balkan Route – which as previously covered, facilitates the trafficking of heroin into Europe – also provides a key trafficking route for migrants looking to enter the EU. This became especially pronounced during the refugee crisis of 2015.

“You can see this especially in Serbia, but also in other countries, for example in Kosovo,” said Kardan Kocani to Balkan Insight,  a Kosovo-based researcher at the GI-TOC. “They don’t have these clashes involving locals; it’s mainly between themselves because of control of the territory.” Likewise, said Kocani, where locals were once the main footsoldiers, more and more migrants and refugees have moved into smuggling. The main problem is none of the countries on the Balkan Route have prioritised the fight against smugglers. It is “mentioned in policy documents, in minutes from meetings and in forums, but in practice […] there is a low number of investigations, prosecution and convictions of smugglers,” said Kocani.

The Albanian Mafia Controls a Vast Smuggling Network

The Albanian mafia controls people-smuggling networks that bring Albanian migrants into the UK, Middle Eastern and African migrants into Europe, and women into the sex trade.
A report conducted by Exit.al in 2021 examined the role Albanian networks play in this people trafficking. People smuggling is done by Albanian, Moroccan, and Kurdish groups who all live in the country working together. Together, these groups pick up groups of migrants from the Greek border and transport them through Albania as they flow from Turkiye into Greece. The cost per migrant can range from thousands of euros for individuals traveling alone to about €250 for those traveling in groups.

According to the report, an Albanian middleman is in charge of hiring drivers, negotiating, setting up the immigration reception, and handling all payments for those involved in the chain: “We have the contacts, we get the exact locations and we contact the drivers.”

Migrants reportedly go through an ‘agency’ in the Greek city of Ioannina, who collects a fee, and then connects them with drivers in Albania – one reported technique is that a car will drive ahead of the vehicle transporting the migrants and report back on police, roadblocks or other potential obstacles. The journey will typically be carried out in rental vans or cars, although construction vehicles are reportedly being used as a way to avoid detection.

Once in Tirana, migrants will be handed over to a series of safe-houses, and the agent will wire the middleman the money. Youths will then be used to withdraw the money. The migrants will then proceed to the next stage of their journey, either to the borders with Kosovo or Montenegro to join the overland border crossings heading towards Slovenia, Austria or Hungary, or they will be smuggled across the sea to Italy. The second route is more newly established, and goes overland, northwards from Albania: Turkiye-GreeceAlbania-Montenegro-Bosnia and Herzegovina-Croatia-Slovenia, and then onwards into Central and Northern Europe. This route will have become especially popular as countries such as Serbia and Hungary began to erect border fences aimed to prevent the flow of migrants coming through their country.

According to Frontex data, in 2022, the Western Balkan route was the most widely used route into Europe, with a reported 145,600 migrants crossing into the EU this way, representing 45% of all irregular entries. This is the highest number of crossings reported on this route since 2015. Citizens of Syria, Afghanistan and Türkiye accounted for the largest number of detections. Nationalities that previously had been little on this route were also reported, such as Tunisians, Indians and Burundis.

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