Is there room for them in our inn?

Sat 26 Dec 2015, 09:54

Kester Ratcliff lives in Bristol. At the moment he is volunteering on Lesvos. Today he has explained the bribery, costs and consequences of the people smuggling operation through Turkey:

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~ The Battle of the Bribes ~

The price of a place in a smugglers' boat ranges between $700-1200 per person. We've also heard from some poorer nationalities of refugees recently that the bad weather price is sometimes $500, but at the same time Syrians are still paying $1200 because they're on average richer than Afghans and others.

One million refugees and forced migrants have entered Europe by the Mediterranean route this year.

These rubber inflatable boats are designed for 10-15 people but they normally put 45-50 in each boat.

So the total price per boat load is about $54,000, for a 6-8km crossing.

The bribe paid to the Turkish coastguard per crossing or to look away for two hours for any number of boats at a time is $35-40,000. The boat and engine probably costs about $5000.

Many refugees have to make multiple attempts at crossing, because they get caught and turned back by the Turkish coastguard. When that happens they have to pay all over again. It's not unusual to make three attempts before succeeding.

The sea crossing is not the only part of the route where they have to pay smugglers to pay off the police or coastguard. They also have to pay huge smuggling prices for the travel to Istanbul and to Izmir. I've also met an Afgani family who said they'd been turned back and paid three times to get through Istanbul.

Another pair of Afghan-Iranian engineers said that they'd been forced to flee because the Taliban threatened to kill them for apostasy because they were openly atheist and didn't keep Ramadan. Obviously, the Quran says "there can be no compulsion in matters of religion", but authoritarian traditionalists in all cultural traditions are typically not very well acquainted with their claimed tradition's texts and history. The two engineers who spoke good English and translated for us also said that they'd been kidnapped while hiking through the mountains across the Turkish border and extorted $1000 each to be released or be killed, and one person who refused to pay was killed in front of them.

So if we could count the number of repeat attempts for each successful crossing and for each part of the journey, it's probably not an unreasonable estimate to guess three payments per person on various stages of the route.

1,000,000 x $1200 x 3 ~= €3bn

So the bribes paid to the Turkish police, coastguards and presumably politicians controlling them and the remaining payments to the shadow economy in Turkey are probably roughly equivalent to the €3bn bribe paid by EU governments to the Turkish government to commit refoulement, illegal push backs and to attack refugees at sea with water cannon and try to sink them, or anything to stop them entering Europe and claiming their intrinsic and universal human right to humanitarian asylum when they really need it, as the vast majority of them clearly do.

So, unsurprisingly given that the battle of the bribes is roughly evenly weighted, the Turkish coastguard play off both sides approximately in proportion to their opposing interests- at night they look away and pretend they couldn't possibly see the boats, and in the day they mostly do not allow them to cross. This one was lucky. They won't have to pay ~$54,000 to the smugglers who pay ~$35-40,000 to the Turkish coastguard again. They're just about to land in Skala Sykeminea now, towed in by the Medicins Sans Frontieres - Greenpeace jointly funded and staffed rescue boat.

Ulhamdillalah assalaameen.

And here is Kester's 'day job' on the island:

I'm up on the hill above the lighthouse, watching and systematically scanning the sea for about 240degrees around with military grade night vision binoculars lent by someone in the military to Lighthouse Relief (the night team here) on a tripod.

The moon is so bright I hardly need a headtorch to go up n down. It's quite windy n wavey now. No boats on the sea yet as far as I can see. When Erlend showed me how to use the night vision binoculars earlier there was a fishing boat out, and we could see the man and the outboard engine and the angle of the boat going against the waves. If I see a boat I can also measure exactly how far away it is.

We aim to alert Proactiva lifeguards long enough in advance for them to tow any refugee boats around to Skala Sykeminea harbour, which is a much safer landing, but if they do have to land here - we don't see them far enough out to alert Proactiva in time, or they look as though they're heading for Tsonias harbour around the next headland from here but sometimes then veer off course and head for here, then we're ready to meet them in 5mins. We sleep in our wetsuits here. We now have a big generator and 7 large LED floodlights on the three or four possible landing points around the lighthouse here, so we can floodlight the area. There's also LED rope lights along the steps we built up from the best landing side with the steepest almost-cliff.

If we see them in time two of us get in the water with signalling lights just like the kind used on airport runways to guide them around to the relatively least dangerous side. The lighthouse was built as a warning to ships that there are dangerous rocks just below sea level in front of it, but refugees skippering boats, probably for the first time, tend to aim for the lighthouse. A few days ago a boat hitting those rocks popped on one side and flipped over, dumping everyone in the water 50m out. Everyone was rescued, including a 4mth old baby, Seuwan, who had to be resuscitated twice.

I should do another sweep with the night vision now