Smuggling migrants from Turkey, often known to insiders as the sheep trade: excerpts from an academic research article describe how smuggling is carried out, which a lot of people don’t know when they engage in anti-trafficking or anti-migration tirades.
The Sheep Trade
In contrast to the well-known tourist destinations along the Turkish Mediterranean coast, Ayvalik is an almost sleepy resort situated only a few kilometers from the Greek island of Lesbos. When we visited Ayvalik in 2003 our host told us right away that only last week a ship sailed out with 23 migrants on board and capsized somewhere nearby. Only three survived. He said: ‘The coastguard doesn’t bother to raise the sunken and stranded ships any more because there are so many of them. I can take you to one.’ The journey did not lead to a stranded ship but to another person who knew the ‘sheep trade’ from personal experience. Just a few years ago the man had helped 800 migrants to board a tanker. It happened the way it always does. He got a call from Istanbul to let him know that his help was needed. He actually succeeded in transporting the 800 people to the sparsely populated coast and from there to the tanker, which was to take them directly to Italy. A day later he got the news that the coastguard had captured the tanker.
The transport service began very small in the late 1980s and in the middle of the 1990s the Kurdish migrants began to show up. In the beginning they all traveled by public transport; then they were brought in minibuses and eventually in three or four big buses —until the police began to notice. Now they are moved in trucks, squashed together like ‘sheep’, as our host put it.
. . . With increasing and more sophisticated technologies of control, the situation has become much more difficult. The main effect was that small smugglers such as the fishermen are losing the race and well-organized smuggler networks are taking over. Another smuggler in Greece told us of his experiences with the practice of border crossings: ‘The payment only comes at the end of the deal.’ That’s the security that the customers or their relatives have. The deal is always a verbal one. When the captain has been contacted and the agreement has been made, the date is set, the ‘heads’ are counted, and finally the price and method of payment are determined. The price varies according to the number of ‘heads’ and the type of journey. The captain can earn up to €15,000 per ‘transport’.
From Transnational Migration and the Emergence of the European Border Regime: An Ethnographic Analysis. Vassilis Tsianos and Serhat Karakayali. European Journal of Social Theory, 13(3) 373–387, 2010.
—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist