Mafia’s Prime Role in Human Trafficking Misery

Italian mobsters work with Egyptian crime syndicates to imprison migrants and extort cash

Coffins of victims are seen in an hangar of Lampedusa airport on October 5, 2013.

MICHAEL DAY 

The role of Italian mobsters in human trafficking – of the kind that saw more than 350 African migrants perish off the coast of Lampedusa in a single boat disaster earlier this month – has been laid bare by police.

Members of Mafia organisations work with crime syndicates in Egypt to charge would-be illegal immigrants for the dangerous voyage from Africa to Italy – and then hold them prisoner in horrendous conditions, to extort more money from the migrants and their families, according to police reports carried by La Repubblica.

Dramatic video evidence has emerged of one of the worst cases, which occurred on 23 September 2011. After paying an Egyptian crime clan to be taken by boat to Sicily, 22 Egyptian men were seized when they landed in the port of Rutta e Ciauli, near Syracuse, and locked in a dark basement for eight days without food or water. Their captors refused to release them until their families wired more money to their captors.

After police freed them on 30 September, the migrants said they had only managed to survive by drinking rainwater that dripped into the dungeon.

In video footage of the moment in which police break into their prison, one policeman told the reporter: “They were herded like rats… the smell was nauseating.”

The Egyptians seized at Rutta e Ciauli told investigators that when their boat neared land, after eight days of travel, it was met by a small boat with three Italians and an Egyptian named Hamada aboard; he was arrested but police have yet to identify the Italians.

According to police, a chilling wiretap made in 2011 overheard one Sicilian Mafia boss telling the Egyptian traffickers: “If they find you, throw them [the migrants] all into the sea”.

Investigators say another large group of North African migrant “prisoners” was discovered earlier this year in Campania, the region dominated by the Camorra crime syndicate. Another case occurred in Sicily two months ago.

Italian police said the payment system in Rutta e Ciauli required migrants to settle part of their fee at the start of their journey, with the Egyptian Amro crime family. An additional amount had to be paid via the Western Union system to a cashier located in Milan. Failure to pay the full amount saw the migrants detained indefinitely.

Mafia expert and author Corrado de Rosa said it was “inevitable” that Mafia clans would be involved in human trafficking on the southern coast of Italy.

“If there are illegal activities in their territory, they’ll know about and they’ll regulate and profit from them,” he said.

He added that Rutta e Ciauli, where the 22 Egyptians in the video were seized, was a “notorious and violent place where migrants, mafia and traffickers come into contact”.

And he said the system of imprisoning migrants until payments are made tied in with what happens across the south of Italy – in the orange groves in Calabria and with the fruit pickers in Puglia. “It’s not exaggerating to use the word “slavery” for the migrants, usually African, some of whom have no freedom until they’ve paid enough money.

 

Egypt’s Chaos Fuels Africa’s Human Trafficking

Egypt’s political unrest has brought suffering not only to its own people but also to hundreds of African refugees. Their goal is Israel but many end up as hostages on the Sinai Peninsula.

Egypt’s political unrest has brought suffering not only to its own people but also to hundreds of African refugees.

By Adrian Kriesch / cm

Kahassay Woldesselasie simply wanted to get away from Eritrea. He planned to begin a new life in a country where citizens are not as brutally suppressed as in his East African homeland. Eritrea, located in the Horn of Africa, is one of the world’s most secretive and repressive regimes.

Woldesselasie initially fled to neighboring Sudan. While there he heard rumors of good jobs being offered in Israel. A human trafficking syndicate offered to take him there. Woldesselasie agreed and fell into their trap. The traffickers abducted him and took him as a hostage to the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula.

On the journey they blindfolded him, there was little food and water. The gangsters threatened to kill him if he did not pay ransom. “You have no choice but to call your relatives,” Woldesselasie told DW in an interview. “If they agree to pay, you might be lucky. But if they don’t, you’re dead.”

The lucky and the unlucky

Israel refers to asylum seekers from Africa as ‘infiltrators’

Woldesselasie was one of the lucky ones. Family members living abroad agreed to pay for his release.

He was set free and finally managed to cross the border into Israel.

Not many are as lucky as Woldesselasie, says Hamdy al-Azazy, an Egyptian human rights activist who lives in al-Arish, the capital of the North Sinai region. He has met Eritrean refugees who had been held captive for weeks in torture camps.

While their families are listening over the phone, the victims would be subjected to burnings or have their limbs broken. Such painful experiences would then push even the poorest of families to send money. Those who don’t comply risk having their relatives being buried in the desert. According to al-Azazy, more than 500 remains of dead bodies of Africans were discovered in the desert in the past years.

The Sinai equation

The Sinai Peninsula has long been a powder keg. The indigenous population consists of Bedouin Arab tribes who settled there several hundred years ago. Today, they only represent about half of the approximately 500,000 inhabitants.

Israel withdrew from the area back in 1982 and left it to the Egyptian state. Egypt then took the best land from the Bedouins, says Günter Meyer, director of the Center for Research on the Arab World at the University of Mainz. “This goes back to a long period of discrimination against the Bedouin population.” According to Meyer, the Bedouins were seen by Egyptians as Israeli collaborators, drug smugglers and illiterate.”

Meyer however emphasizes that only a small minority of the Bedouin is involved in the criminal gangs that deal in human trafficking.

According to Human Rights Watch over 1,500 Eritreans flee the country every month. Several men who are refugees in the Sinai are seated on the ground .

Following the Arab Spring which began in 2011, security forces have been weakened in the Sinai Peninsula giving the traffickers more leeway. The situation has “escalated dramatically,” Meyer warns.

There are no known figures for the number of refugees detained in torture camps in the Sinai or how many of those hostages have perished. According to the Israeli government, more than 10,000 illegal immigrants crossed the Sinai border into Israel in 2012. Most of them came from Eritrea and Sudan. But in Israel, a nation once founded by immigrants, the refugees are not welcome. They have little chance of obtaining political asylum. Instead Israel has built a more than 200-kilometer – long (124 miles) fence against them. In the first five months of 2013, only 33 refugees managed to cross the border.

Little international support

The world, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), has turned a deaf ear to the plight of these refugees, says human rights activist Hamdy al-Azazy. “They write their reports from their air-conditioned offices in Cairo,” he laments.

“Nobody is on site to assess the real situation. I’m the only one here in the midst of all these dangers.” There have been several attacks on him, he adds.

His office was ransacked, his children have been attacked.

African asylum seekers meet with harsh reality in Israel. The few meager belongings of a refugee lie scattered around the area of the park which he has made his home.Ashley Gallagher, Tel Aviv May 2013via: DW/ Robert Mudge,

Al-Azazy also raises serious allegations against the Egyptian security forces. According to him victims who manage to escape from the hands of the traffickers are detained as criminals because they are in the country illegally. But the perpetrators of human trafficking enjoy a life of luxury in large villas. He believes the traffickers are supported by Egypt’s security agencies.

“Traffickers pay a lot of bribes so that they can freely bring refugees to the Sinai.”

Kahassay Woldesselasie does not feel at home in Israel. He hopes that one day peace and freedom will reign in his East African nation so he can return.