EU policy has stagnated while illegal migrant routes proliferate.
Capturing suspected pirates off the coast of Somalia in 2012.
Source: European Union Naval Force
By Michael Scott Moore
Ahmed was 23 when he left his village near Kismayo, on the southern coast of Somalia, because of a grinding lack of work. He travelled for 18 days across the dry Somali scrub, swaying on top of long-distance trucks, until he reached the town of Dolow, just south of the Ethiopian border. Locals sneaked him past border guards, by night, across the Jubba River. These Somali passeurs—the equivalents of “coyotes” who move immigrants across the U.S.-Mexican border—were the first people he met in a wide network of smugglers, facilitators, and violent extortionists who work the migrant trail from the Horn of Africa to Europe.
On the Ethiopian side, Ahmed stowed away on a grocery truck leaving for Addis Ababa, more than 600 miles northwest. “It is normal,” he said. “You will be stopped at a checkpoint, where you will be questioned. But the police let the Somalis pass because they know that Somalis have fled because of difficulties and insecurity.”
By this point, his passeurs, including the man who transported him to Addis Ababa, hadn’t charged him a thing. “He tell me I can pay later.”
Somalia has lacked a functioning central government since 1991, when the dictator Siad Barre fell, and a desultory civil war has thumped along clan boundaries in the dry desert bush ever since. Whole regions of the country belong to clan militias or al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-linked Salafist group, and there are few jobs. Many Somalis in the past few years have migrated toward Europe, like other African refugees, along now-established smuggling routes that are more dangerous than they might seem from the vantage of a Somali village.
The past few years of chaos in Libya have opened a path through that country to Europe, and Ahmed’s journey was typical. He was headed for Italy through the central Mediterranean route, which can start deep within Africa. Smugglers brought him to a town near Addis and installed him at a restaurant, where he washed dishes for nine months, earning $20 a month. Work for little or no pay is common along the migrant trail; many smugglers look at migrants as a source of cheap labor. When the time came, he moved on. Ahmed couldn’t say whether all the people he met in Ethiopia belonged to the same network, but he was in the hands of one smuggler or another from the Somali border all the way to Libya.
Source: Bloomberg
