People smugglers are increasingly recruiting people from former Soviet republics in central Asia to pilot boats carrying migrants from Turkey to Italy, say NGOs and lawyers.
The migrants are taken by sea from Turkey to Italy, often using sailing boats, as an alternative to the longer overland route through the Balkans where border guards in Croatia and Slovenia have engaged in illegal pushbacks of asylum seekers at the EU border.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 7,153 migrants, paying more than €8,000 each, arrived on one of the coasts of Sicily, Puglia or Calabria from the Turkish ports of İzmir, Bodrum and Çanakkale in 2023.
A report released by the Italian NGO Arci Porco Rosso and the nonprofit Borderline Europe said of 68 boat drivers arrested in 2023 by Italian police on the route on charges of illegally transporting asylum seekers from Turkey, at least 18 had come from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan.
The central Asian boat drivers have largely replaced Ukrainian and Russian skippers who were previously recruited by the Turkish smuggling gangs who run the route. “In the past, criminal organisations aimed to recruit professional Ukrainian fishermen and sailors,” Olesya Dzedzinska, an Italian-Ukrainian lawyer who has defended numerous foreign skippers, told the Guardian.
“But over time, smugglers started looking elsewhere, in the countries of central Asia. The war in Ukraine and the impossibility for men to leave the country influenced this choice, but also the fact that the news of skippers being arrested and ending up in prison had spread in Ukraine, and fewer and fewer Ukrainians were accepting the risk of going to jail.”
When the boat enters Italian waters, authorities ask passengers to identify the driver, who is then arrested under Italian law and can be charged with offences including aiding and abetting illegal immigration, trafficking in migrants, or criminal association. They can face prison sentences from 15 years or, in the event of passengers dying, life.
Five boat drivers were arrested after a shipwreck on the night of 25 February 2023 when an overcrowded wooden vessel carrying as many as 200 people fell apart in stormy seas just a few metres from the beach of Cutro, in Calabria. The bodies of at least 90 people were recovered, including dozens of children from Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq seeking refuge in Europe. Normally, two boat drivers are recruited to pilot a sailing boat carrying migrants, but their number can increase based on the size of the vessel or the number of people on board.
At least 40 people currently detained in Italian prisons, accused of aiding and abetting illegal immigration from Turkey to Italy, come from the central Asia republics, according to the report.
“The majority of these skippers are unaware of the law and have no idea about the risks they face when accepting to pilot these boats,” Dzedzinska said. “Some of these men are only 20 or even 19 years old. Italian law often fails to consider that they too are victims of criminal organisations exploiting them for their profit […] many of the boat drivers from central Asia were forced to learn how to pilot a yacht in less than a week.”
The drivers have often fled their own countries to avoid military service or to escape poverty by finding work in Turkey. Other pilots on the route include Pakistanis and Tunisians.
A 20-year-old man from Uzbekistan sentenced to three years in 2021 for smuggling 48 people from Turkey to Calabria, told the Guardian he had no idea he would be arrested. “I thought it was just like any other job,” the man, who asked to remain anonymous, said. “In Uzbekistan, there were no job opportunities. First, I went to Russia, where I worked as a courier, and then to Turkey. When they proposed that I take those people in a sailboat to Italy, I accepted because I had no job at the time, but I didn’t know it was illegal.”
Italy arrested approximately 250 boat drivers in 2023, according to the report, with the majority Egyptian nationals piloting vessels carrying migrants from Libya or Tunisia.
A previous report by Arci Porco Rosso and the NGOs Alarm Phone and Borderline Europe said an estimated 3,250 boat drivers had been arrested by Italy since 2013 and found evidence of police officers offering immigration papers and other incentives to migrants to persuade them to testify against the suspects, who in some cases were asylum seekers forced at gunpoint by traffickers to navigate refugee boats.
Although the number of arrests of boat drivers has fallen in recent years, charities and human rights organisations have raised concerns about the practice.
“Arresting boat drivers is a central part of Europe’s racist border policies, as we can see from the increasingly draconian laws being passed in Italy and elsewhere,” said Richard Braude of Arci Porco Rosso. “There are more than 1,000 people in Italian prisons for this so-called crime, and there will only be more until this absurd law is abolished.”
