From human traffickers to the use of advanced control and surveillance technologies:the business of the Balkan route

https://www.valigiablu.it/business-rotta-balcanica/

The Swiss think tank Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime published a in May reports dedicated to the trafficking of people, drugs and money in the Western Balkans, edited by Walter Kemp, Kristina Amerhauser and Ruggero Scaturro.

The study was one of the first to deal in a systemic and diachronic way with the evolutions that the "Balkan route" has experienced over the last half century.What was initially a corridor for narcotics later became, especially due to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the El Dorado for arms traffickers and, in recent times, the obligatory route for tens of thousands of human beings fleeing from war, poverty, environmental catastrophes.

If since the 1970s the "Balkan route" mainly meant the drug trafficking network - especially heroin - which branches out across the Balkan peninsula, in 2015 the expression took on a new meaning.Around 1.5 million refugees and asylum seekers, mostly fleeing the war in Syria, set out across Turkey, Greece and the Western Balkans with the aim of reaching Central-Western Europe.

Initially taken aback by such huge numbers, the governments of the European Union countries then reacted, driven by rhetoric that feared the arrival of "hordes" of foreigners.

In March 2016, the Balkan route was therefore officially closed, through the construction of barriers along the borders, the increase in border controls, often entrusted to the EU agency Frontex, and the speeding up of the analysis of asylum requests.In addition of course to the well-known agreement between the EU and Türkiye, a do ut des of 3 (+ 3) billion euros which made Ankara Brussels' trusted jailer.

If these actions they actually caused a significant drop in the number of refugees and asylum seekers, the flow has not stopped.Most of the reasons that pushed people to migrate in 2015 - war in Syria, Libya and Afghanistan;instability in the Horn of Africa;North-South inequality - have not vanished.Indeed, they have often become exacerbated, as shown by the case of Afghanistan where, after the farewell of the USA, the control of the entire territory by the Taliban pushed waves of Afghans to flee.

The erection of walls in 2016 expanded the market for human traffickers.Some once very porous borders, such as the one between Greece and North Macedonia and the one between Serbia and Hungary, have become more difficult to cross.Migrants therefore had to look for alternative routes to reach EU countries - for example, from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Croatia, from Albania to Italy, from Serbia to Romania and Bulgaria.

The increase in pitfalls, difficulties and dangers in moving around each country on the route and, above all, in crossing a border, corresponds to a greater willingness to pay on the part of the migrant, a vulnerable subject with usually a very limited spectrum of options to choose from.Therefore, more profit margin for traffickers.

Who have also capitalized on the COVID-19 pandemic.The declarations of a state of emergency and the total closure of the borders have further complicated travel and crossings, making the activity of these now highly specialized networks even more profitable.

Offers you can't refuse

Seen through the eyes of organized crime, migrants embody the prototype of the ideal customer.They have no claims to boast;I cannot submit complaints and protests;they must necessarily hide from the authorities;almost always, they are willing to do anything to land in the EU, even to shell out astronomical sums to travel a few tens of km.Often the first attempts to cross are unsuccessful and one is forced to try again and again.Each spin requires you to pay a fee.

Box zero for those trying to take the Balkan route is usually Thessaloniki, Greece, where most of the people arriving from Türkiye gather.The train station of this Greek port is swarming with solicitors, ready to offer their services to migrants, more or less desperate and more or less rich.

According to the authors of the report, traffickers can be divided into three categories.

THE “fixers” transport migrants within a country.Not requiring great levels of organization and training, the sector is quite open:it also happens that private citizens improvise taxi drivers to take people from a hub (station, airport, port) to the next international border.Rates vary based on the length of the route, the number of passengers and the probability of being stopped.If even just 20 euros can be enough to cross Montenegro from one border to another, for the Gevgelija - Veles section, in North Macedonia, the figures are between 500 and 700 euros.

THE “gatekeeper” they are responsible for crossing the borders:a few km, often covered on foot, but decisive.To succeed in the undertaking, a fair level of organization and different skills are needed, which is why mixed groups often operate composed of locals who know the area well and migrants who have already been there for some time, who act as interpreters and mediators.Faced with such a delicate and multidimensional service, the rates, which often include bribes to customs officers, rise:to go from the Serbian Novi Kneževac to Hungary or Romania you need between 200 and 500 euros, but the entrance ticket for the tunnel that leads from Kelebija (Serbia) to Ásotthalom (Hungary) starts from 800 and can go up to triple that.

THE “package dealers”, finally, they represent the top of the pyramid of human trafficking in the Western Balkans.They offer, as the name suggests, a complete package, acting as a sort of travel agency for travelers without a return ticket.They offer advice, information, accommodation, transport.Through a widespread network of subordinates they manage to identify their customers, mainly families, already in refugee camps in Türkiye or in the large cities on the Greek-Turkish border.The costs, also in this case, depend above all on:starting point, arrival point, means of transport, dangerousness of the route.From the Serbian Republic (one of the three administrative entities into which Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided) to Slovenia you pay around 1,000 euros per person, for the entire route - from Turkey to the EU via the Western Balkans - a family of four can get to spend between 15 and 20 thousand euros.

To estimate (margin of error:20%) to how much the annual turnover deriving from this "business" could amount to. The authors of the report focused on the three hottest areas:the Greece-North Macedonia and Greece-Albania borders (19.5 - 29 million euros);the Bosnia and Croatia border (7 - 10.5);and the Serbia - Hungary and Serbia - Romania borders (8.5 - 10.5).

Overall, then, the "business" of the Balkan route earns traffickers between 35 and 50 million euros per year.

But human smugglers aren't the only people who thrive on it migration securitization policy with which the EU states try to entrench themselves.A technological-industrial sector is being formed which owes its development to this policy.

An ultra-technological Panopticon to surveil and punish

Although there is not yet a uniform and exhaustive framework, probably due to the difficulty in finding information on such a controversial topic, various elements indicate that the use of latest generation advanced control and surveillance technologies is becoming increasingly widespread along the EU border .

At the end of January the Border Violence Monitoring Network broadcast a reports to Tendayi Achiume, UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance.The document focuses on the role of technology in the rejections carried out by the Croatian border police towards Serbia and Bosnia.It is based on the direct testimonies of people rejected and abused at the border, and contains an accurate description, also from a technical point of view, of the technologies adopted (drones, helicopters, scanners for recognizing people inside vehicles, thermal viewers for night and day vision ).The Croatian police has also thermal imaging cameras capable of identifying a person within a radius of approximately 1.5 km and a vehicle 3 km away.The most advanced technology, however, is drones.Those supplied to Croatian customs officers can locate a person almost 10 km away during the day and 2 during the night.They travel at almost 130 km/h and reach a height of 3500 meters, without ever stopping transmitting data in real time.

As reported from the Guardian, Hungarian border guards also have technologies such as thermal goggles and surveillance drones.Also in 2017, the Hungarian government decided to make the border with Serbia even more impassable, installing an electrified network, dotted with temperature detectors, cameras and speakers that continuously broadcast an extremely annoying ringing for dissuasive purposes.Also thanks to these technologies, the Central European country was able to push back thousands of people (2,824 in January alone) to Serbia, a practice judged against to community law by the European Court of Justice and which led to suspension of Frontex activities in the country.An amendment introduced in 2017 removes the investments that Budapest makes in the field of migration management from the control of what little remains of Hungarian civil society - a usual practice in Viktor Orbán's Hungary, also applied in the case of infrastructure projects in which China is involved.

Romania has also equipped itself with hi-tech equipment for migration control, such as explained on the Romanian border police website, which can employ more than a hundred thermal viewers and about twenty vehicles equipped with this technology, as well as sensors designed to detect heartbeats remotely.

However, the new frontier, also in this field, concerns the use of artificial intelligence (IA).Last June the European Parliament Research Service published a detailed analysis entitled "Artificial intelligence at the EU borders” in which the researcher Costica Dumbrava listed the possible applications of AI in the field of migration management:biometric identification (automated fingerprinting and facial recognition);risk assessment using algorithms;monitoring, analysis and forecasting of migratory flows;emotional state detection.

Some of these techniques, according to what supported by AP News, would already be used in Greece on an experimental basis;they would have been installed taking advantage of the period of relative quiet imposed by the pandemic also in this hot area.An open-air laboratory is being set up across the Greek-Turkish border where the most futuristic control methods are being tested.We can glimpse the profile of a future model of fully automated "border management" thanks to the massive use of AI and other digital devices.

Among the technologies adopted by the Greek border police, often assisted by Frontex personnel:long-range cameras, night vision goggles and sensors of various ranges installed on surveillance towers to collect data on suspicious movements and send them to research centers where they are analyzed using AI software;lie detectors, also based on AI, and bots used during interrogations as “virtual policemen”;handheld scanners for reading and cataloging the intertwining of the veins of the hand;technologies for 3D reconstruction of the migrant's silhouette, in case he has, for example, camouflaged himself in the foliage.

Fortress Europe digitized

The purchase of these technologies, as well as the research necessary to create them, has often been financed by the EU itself.Pressured by the most extremist member states on the migration issue, the European Commission has shown itself increasingly willing to channel the bulk of the resources (financial and political) at its disposal for the purpose of sealing the external borders.

Of the almost 25.7 billion euros (current prices) that Brussels has allocated to the spending section "Migration and border control" in the next multi-annual budget 2021-2027, 11.1 are destined for the "migration" chapter and 14.4 for "border control".To understand how much the political Zeitgeist of the continent has changed in a relatively short time, it is enough to remember that in the previous budget there was not even a section specifically dedicated to the management of migratory flows, but only a generic "Fund for asylum, migration and 'integration" into the expenditure item "Security and citizenship”, which had earned the meager figure of 3.1 million.

And the expenditure item that saw the most noticeable increase in percentage terms was precisely "decentralized agencies - borders" (+164% compared to the previous multi-year budget), i.e. Frontex and, to a lesser extent, Easo.As indicated in a report by ASGI, the funds allocated to Frontex had already gone from 6.3 million euros in 2005 to 333 in 2019.Specifically, the portion dedicated to “repatriation operations” had increased from 80 thousand euros (2005) to 63 million (2019).For the next seven years, Frontex will be able to count on an endowment of 11 billion euros, of which 2.2 billion for the acquisition, maintenance and management of resources for air, maritime and land surveillance.An increase in staff is also planned:from the current 6,500 units it should reach 10 thousand in 2027.As remember Cespi, the evolution of Frontex "is part of the European strategy to strengthen the governance of migration and respond to internal security needs".

In short, the EU - directly or through the agencies emanating from it - seems ready to spend a lot to prevent unwanted (or undesirable) subjects from being able to cross the walls of the bloc.Especially in the most promising sector:new control and surveillance technologies.

The European Commission clarified this last June 2nd by sending a communication to the European Parliament and the Council entitled "A strategy for a fully functioning and resilient Schengen area”.Twenty-five pages which can be considered a sort of community programmatic manifesto where both the principles to be followed and the actions to be taken for "management modern and effective external borders of the EU” [italics added].

The strategy aims to "transform the external border management system into one of the best performing systems in the world".Making the EU adigitized fortress”, according to NGOs dealing with migration.

The introduction explains that to increase confidence in the solidity of the management of the EU's external border it is necessary to adopt an "integrated and strategic approach", which translates into "systematic surveillance of border activities" and the use of " modern and interconnected digital technologies and increasingly digitized procedures".Member States are invited to update and share national databases where information on people trying to cross the EU border is collected, and it is proposed to adopt forms of pre-screening for these people.That is, registering the people crowded at the borders before they actually manage to cross it.This is with the aim of "accelerating the procedures to identify their status" and, but the document does not make this explicit, speeding up expulsions.

Despite the more or less vague references to respect for "fundamental rights" that underpin the document, the spirit that animates it emerges clearly.The "management of external borders" is downgraded to a simple security issue, we must avoid by all means that anyone manages to enter the EU without having the requirements, the use of increasingly sophisticated technologies is the most effective way to achieve this result .

Image:Gémes Sándor/SzomSzed, CC BY-SA 3.0, go Wikimedia Commons

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